Log of changes to Boom Engine

Lee Killough

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7/26/98 (post-Phase I)

Enhanced movement clipping to allow things to move out of closed doors if
partially stuck inside them.

Fixed Doom sky hack bug, in which invulnerability colormap was ignored when
drawing skies.

7/24/98 (post-Phase I)

Fixed monsters stuck over ledges, and things stuck after silent l2l 
teleporters, by relaxing movement clipping to allow monsters to move back
towards ledge if already hanging at its height, and by allowing objects to
move away from 1s walls if stuck partially inside them. Both optioned off
in pre-v2.02 demos, to preserve demo sync.

7/21/98 (post-Phase I)

Fixed dogs to count towards kills, but made friendly monsters not count
towards kills. Made TNTEM cheat kill all non-friendly monsters first,
and then all of the friendly ones if it's used again. Fixed friendly PE
spawning.

7/19/98 (post-Phase I)

Added classic BFG weapon support. Old BFG threw many fireballs instead of
one big green flash. The two classic fireballs are represented by PLS1 and
PLS2 sprites. For more details, see my web page.

Added MF_FRIEND flag, which indicates friendly monsters. Friendly monsters
help the player by attacking other monsters. Friendly Arch-Viles and Boss
Brains (re)spawn monsters with the same friendliness as the spawner. Initial
implementation allows up to 3 co-op players to be replaced by dogs in
single-player games. The dogs are represented by DOGS sprites. Any monsters
can be made friendly, at the start or during the middle of the game.

Made monster infighting optional, but preserving old demos. If infighting
is disabled, monsters will not attack each other to death if provoked,
making it harder for player to trick monsters into fighting each other.

6/3/98  (post-source-code release):

Fixed problems with v2.00 demo headers being a different size from v2.01
headers, causing game lockups when playing back v2.00 demos.

5/27/98 (post-source-code release):

Fixed problem with End Game and Load Game during demo recordings, and Load
Game during demo playbacks.

5/27/98:

Investigated problem where monsters awaken when carried by conveyors to
another sector (perhaps through teleporter): Problem is that in Doom, player
gunfire sounds are transmitted throughout sectors and stored in the form of
'soundtargets' for each sector. Each sector that can hear a player's gunshot
gets that player as its soundtarget, and then anytime a monster goes in that
sector, they can "hear" that soundtarget even if the sound is long-dead.
This wasn't an issue in Doom because monsters didn't move from one sector to
another unless they were already awake.

In Boom you can carry them when they are asleep, and then old sounds left
over in sectors' soundtargets can awaken them for no apparent reason.

5/25/98:

Fixed drift caused by roundoff error in wall scroller delta calcluations.
The R_PointToAngle2() function is not accurate enough for wall scrollers,
so instead of using it, I use a different dot product formula that always
preserves orthogonality (the only roundoff error is in the speed now -- if
either the true value of the x or y components of scrolling are exactly 0,
then that resulting component will be exactly 0, something not always
preserved before).

5/15/98:

Fixed bug in which savegame consistency check failure message was applied
inconsistently :) Now it appears no matter where you load the savegame from,
and it's friendlier because it stays on the screen as long as it waits for
you to answer whether to load the savegame anyway. -loadgame also works
better now -- instead of aborting with an error message, it starts the game
anyway, with the main title sequence overlayed with a consistency warning
allowing you to force it to be loaded.

iwads are also listed now, so that if you try to load a Doom 2 savegame
while running the Doom 1 iwad, for example, it will tell you the savegame
uses Doom 2 because the doom2.wad's path used when the game was saved, is
shown.

Changes in g_game.c, g_game.h, m_menu.c, m_menu.h, d_main.c

5/14/98

Found that Doom bug in thinker deletion algorithm could be fixed without
sacrificing demo sync in most cases, if we use two different methods for
finding the 'next' pointer, depending on whether the node is being deleted
next. For undeleted nodes we wait until after processing the function; for
deleted nodes we load the 'next' pointer first. Not 100% Doom compatible,
but good enough for demo sync, and 100% safe.

5/13/98

Fixed bug in status bar when the consoleplayer in a netgame demo isn't green.

Restored v1.9 demo sync some more, but only at a price: we must go back to
using that Doom bug (using linked list's "next" pointer after the node has
been freed, in p_tick.c) in order to restore demo sync!!!  One wonders how
Doom even ran!!!  Such demos are detected and flagged appropriately -- if
Boom crashes during a Doom demo, it knows whether it used unsafe methods to
preserve demo sync, and tells the user.

5/12/98

Fixed silent teleporters, yet again :) Had to fix z-coordinate of thing at
exit.

Had to exclude voodoo dolls from evironmental bobbing influences, in order
to prevent hiccups from occurring in silent teleporters on conveyors.

Previously if a voodoo doll was on a conveyor which carried them across a
teleporter linedef or over a ledge, the teleportation or dropoff would cause
the real player to experience bobbing. Now the real player's bobbing is
unaffected by voodoo dolls. This was not an big issue in Doom, since the
only way to move a voodoo doll was to shoot them, and so rarely did they
walk up steps or teleport and thus cause the real player to experience
bobbing.

Investigated GODLESS3.WAD but could not reproduce any problems other than
demo sync problems, which are not unexpected in at least some wads.

5/10/98

Improved Boom performance around 20 fps by, reluctantly :), adding inlined
assembly code for abs(), FixedMul() and FixedDiv(). The inlined assembly is
#ifdef'ed to only be used when DJGPP is the compiler. The code is used
everywhere and so if there were any problems with it, they would show up
immediately. The code is also small (1-10 lines per function).

Restored v1.9 demo sync during intermission screens with messages.

5/9/98

Fixed silent teleporter bugs, by taking player viewheight into account
during silent teleportation and by more intelligently choosing where to exit
(the infinitesimal exit position must be carefully made to land on a certain
side of the exit linedef). Tested thoroughly with every combination of
sector heights and relative linedef angles.

Silent l2l teleporter code was tripled in size, in order to fix the problems :)

Studied Cacodemon desync problem, but could not identify root cause. No Boom
code whatsoever, which is unique to floating monsters, can be replaced with
the real thing and fix v1.9 demo desync. It's not frames, height code, or
anything like that. Just as the previous major desync was a roundoff error
difference in a monster sight calculation, this desync's cause may be just
as subtle and unrelated to its symptoms. The desync must either be in some
code which is not uniquely related to floating monsters, or the real thing
is not v1.9 demo- compatible.

5/7/98:

Fixed exit position of reversed line-to-line teleporters.

Switched ammo 3 and 4 in TNTAMMO cheat so that ordering follows status bar.

Fixed Doom bug in which RNG was called in a way that depended on compiler's
order of evaluation, which is unspecified (I'm talking about where it uses
P_Random()-P_Random() to generate random values around 0).

To prevent confusion, made translucency lumps get ignored unless they are
exactly 64K. TRANMAP.DAT no longer will work without error.

Made monsters blind if they are directly tangent to a water surface (their
head is right on the water), and the player is on the other side.

Fixed bug (no symptoms noticable, though) in which -1 pointer hack wasn't
completely removed by me. I had replaced the -1 pointer hack with the
address of a real function, but missed it in a couple of places. p_mobj.c
and p_tick.c are concerned with this -1 pointer hack, which indicates a
thinker is about to be deleted.

Investigated Cacodemon and PE demo desyncing, sometimes cutting and pasting
part of the real thing into Boom, but could not get v1.9 demos with lots of
Caco or PE action to stay in sync. Replacing every function which uses
MF_FLOAT or MF_NOGRAVITY did not help -- it appears to be something more
fundamental, like roundoff in arithmetic calculations.

Reformatted my parts of p_spec.c.

5/2/98-5/3/98:

Finished work on all my files, except for the shared ones Jim and Ty have
first.

MASSIVE reorg of headers and files. On files that were not assigned to me,
usually only the top few #include lines were affected, so merging should
not be hard, since 95%+ of those files were untouched by me.

Every header file has been corrected w.r.t. global functions and data
and headers it depends on, and every file has had its set of #includes
minimized.  The makefile dependencies have been regenerated.

You now get almost as few unnecessary rebuilds as possible.

p_local.h and r_local.h have been eliminated. p_map.h and p_maputl.h
added. global declarations in g_game.c and m_misc.c have been moved to
proper headers.

Fixed bug in networking code which didn't take compatibility flag into
account (will cause network inconsistencies if players have different
orig_doom_compatibility options). Needs testing, but it's #ifdef'ed with
LEESFIXES in d_net.*.

5/1/98:

Refixed weapons switch bug: original fix was incomplete and prevented '0'
from working all the time. Found another unrelated weapons switch bug: the
'1' and '3' keys (chainsaw/fist and shotgun/SSG) would not reflect player
preferences immediately if changed in the setup screen, because original
algorithm relied on a cached table which was only initialized once per
game. Fixed it by adding P_WeaponPreferred() to p_pspr.c, which tests
whether player prefers one weapon over another, and which always reflects
the latest player preferences instead of just a snapshot at startup.

Reformatted files. No functional (semantic) changes unless otherwise
mentioned, but some structural (syntax) changes were made sometimes, to
beautify code.  Most significantly affected was g_game.c, due to its
initial messiness. Lots of prototypes and declarations in g_game.c were
moved to header files instead.

The general paradigm is that most variables or functions defined externally
in a .c file should be declared in the corresponding .h file, and the .h
file should be #included instead of redeclaring the variables or functions
inside each of the .c files which use them.

Lots of commented out dead code was removed.

4/29/98:

Fixed bug in which game would pause and not pause backwards according to
whether a demo is playing. File: p_tick.c

Fixed "TNTAMO10" bug. Bug has existed since March, and was due to
prematurely setting the pending weapon in a weapons switch to "no_change".
If the current weapon was the fist, and no other weapons had ammo, then
'0' (weapons toggle) would crash game, because the code would enter an
infinite loop -- it would keep setting the pending weapon to the fist
(the only valid choice), but then, since it's also the current weapon,
the code would switch the weapon selection back to "nochange". Sort of
like getting your ear bitten :) The loop's terminating condition was that
the pending weapon was something other than "nochange", so it would enter
an infinite loop if the current weapon was the only allowed weapon. Fix
was to stop setting the pending weapon to "nochange" inside the loop.

4/28/98:

Improved texture error message display to show all bad textures (textures
containing columns without a patch, or missing patches) before aborting.

4/26/98:

Fixed the bug which caused rare crash. Problem was that sometimes a mobj's
target was left pointing to a deleted mobj. In demo which caught this, the
crash occurs right as a barrel explodes and hurts a dying lost soul. Somehow
the barrel is not able to finish inflicting damage, before the lost soul has
died and is removed completely. The fix is to delay the deletion of thinkers
generally, by using a multi-staged lazy approach, and when a mobj thinker is
processed, check its tracer field to see if it points to a target about to
be deleted. If so, delay the deletion of that object. I tried the simpler
approach of setting the target field to NULL when the target is about to be
deleted, but that breaks demo sync, while this fix doesn't.

Fixed an intermission screen bug which was also caused by using data after
it was freed. Problem was data pointed to by "lnames" was used after it was
freed in wi_stuff.c.

4/25/98:

Fixed major bug in P_RunThinkers() in which data was used after it was
freed, after adding code to z_zone.c which intentionally scrambles data
right before freeing it (to amplify the ill-effects of using it after it's
freed). Found another bug with this freed memory debugging trick, a segviol
when a player is attacked under rare conditions, but did not have time to
isolate and fix it, and since it almost never happens unless the freed
memory is erased, I left it standing.

Fixed item pickup sounds to keep them from stopping weapons sounds. Problem
was that every sound needs an origin to work consistently with spy mode
(F12) (sometimes a NULL origin was used in Doom, which made the console
player hear it at full volume, but it also made other players hear it full
volume too).  But only one sound was allowed per origin at a time. Since the
item being picked up disappears, it cannot be the origin for the pickup
sound, so the player has to be the origin. But the player is also the origin
of weapons fire. Current fix is kludgy and will likely be redesigned in
Phase 2: item pickup sounds have their sound number masked with a large
bitmask, and the sound routine does not stop sounds based on origin unless
they both have this bitmask set or cleared. Affected files: s_sound.c,
s_sound.h, p_inter.c

Commented and reformatted these files:

s_sound.c, s_sound.h, r_plane.c, r_plane.h, r_defs.h, r_data.c, z_zone.h,
w_wad.c, w_wad.h, r_segs.c, r_segs.h, m_fixed.h

Added gcc's __attribute__ extension, under #ifdef __GNUC__, to make gcc
catch programmer mistakes in printf formats passed to dprintf() and
I_Error().  Files affected: doomdef.h, g_game.h, i_system.h.

Found bug in r_things.c using new check (long versus int in an I_Error()
format string in r_things.c).

Fixed cr_gold declaration error in info.c -- it must be static in info.c if
it is not to conflict with the global cr_gold pointer defined in v_video.c.

Added #ifdef __GNUC__ around m_fixed.h's gcc extensions.

Added STBAR, M_NMARE, WIMINUS, and DSGETPOW lumps to info.c for Doom v1.1.

4/23/98:

Fixed two cheat bugs affecting demos: prevented most cheats from being
activated during demo playback (previously only demo recordings had them
excluded), and cleared player cheats such as IDDQD and IDCLIP when starting
demos (previously cheats could mess up internal demos played after End
Game).

4/20/98:

Fixed monster sight code so that monsters cannot see player when totally
separated by water or fake ceilings. Leads to interesting effects --
monsters tend to pop their head out from under the water and attack the
player!!!  May need to be made optional and/or turned back off when
translucent flats are added in Phase II.

Also found bug which caused some demo sync problems: monster sight code had
slight roundoff error due to point/line query optimization. Now all 4 demos
in Ultimate Doom stay in sync, and other v1.9 demos are expected to have
better success now too.

4/18/98:

Fixed bug in screenshot code (data could be freed before it was finished
being used).

Consolidated cheat code into one table. Now deh-specific stuff is
included as part of the cheat table and will not break if table order
is modified. Cheats can be individually disabled during DM, coop, demo
recordings, -deh, and while menu is active. idk added back, but disabled
during -deh.

Fixed boss brain savegame bug. Landings were not properly reinitialized after
saved game was loaded, causing saved landing targets to become NULL.

Fixed namespace errors in 5 places: flats animation, intermissions background,
small screen size background, help screen background, and registered game
check. Exhaustively searched every source file for lump name lookups. Found
no more cases. Namespace code works now and should go out in the next release
after a week of internal testing.

4/17/98:

Updated DCK configuration files for new linedef types.

Added traditional_menu option since there appears to be a mutual
disagreement over the order the main menu items should be in.

Improved silent teleporter response time by adding P_FindLineFromTag() to
find linedefs matching tags quickly.

Fixed problem with linedef types 213, 261 not causing new light levels to be
drawn if they were the only thing making the sector different.

Fixed namespace problem with flats, patches, colormaps and sprites. Now the
lumps are all tagged internally, and are searched by specific tags. Sprites,
flats, and colormaps are in their own lump namespace now (apart from their
markers). However, if a texture patch cannot be found in the global
namespace, it will be searched for in the sprite namespace, since apparently
some wads use sprite patches for wall patches too (INVASIO2 did). If other
non-wall graphics patches need to be able to use the sprite patches, then
sprites may have to be put under the global namespace instead of a separate
one.

INVASIO2 seems to be the more perverted wad when it comes to name collision :)

4/15/98:

Fixed blazing door double-closing sound (something I had been meaning to add
to our list earlier). This change is compatibility-optioned. Blazing doors
making double-closing sounds has been a complaint, and it does sound odd.

Fixed generalized door opening sounds. Generalized doors being opened were
always making the blazing door closing sound, instead of a regular opening
sound or blazing opening sound (depending on speed).

Fixed silent line->line teleporter bug, by nudging exit coordinates by 1
part in 2^16 if they are on top of the exit line. Now regular silent
teleporters, and the reversing ones Jim just added for me, work without
"hiccups" like double-teleportation.

Apparently when I used floating-point back in January for point-line
queries, it was more accurate, and teleporters didn't have this problem.
Now that I'm back to using Doom's method (in light of disappearing E3
imps etc.), I seem to have inherited this problem with landing on lines.

Fixed 2s normal textures from bleeding underwater or over fake ceilings.
Does not affect Doom wads which do this effect intentionally, and does
not prevent a determined author like Jim <g> from doing it with outside
sector references.

Fixed bug mentioned in the NGs, in which cheats like IDCLEV work while
inside thermometer menus -- I simply disabled cheats from working while
the menu is active.

4/14/98:

Investigated silent teleporters -- Jack was right, there is a problem :(
They don't work anymore. The player gets stuck because they are considered
on the "wrong side" of the teleporter line. I can't get any of my effects
with it to work right. This is a showstopper, IMO. Silent teleporters "work"
as far as moving the player and other objects, but if you try special tricks
like rooms-over-rooms, you have to either make the player come out facing
the wrong way, or you end up with "sticky teleporters" where the player's
momentum carries them back and forth between two teleporters constantly, or
where they can't get out of one side of the teleporter because as soon as
they teleport from A to B, B's line carries them right back to A.

Problem seems to be in considering which side of a linedef the player is on.
When the player exits a line-line teleporter, they are always supposed to be
on the first side of the linedef, and the teleporter code, which has been
stable for over a month, ensures that this is true. But sometimes, depsite
this assurance, Boom currently will teleport a player right back as soon as
they walk across that line, even though they are supposed to be walking out
of the first side. Something in the line-crossing logic is bad.

Also, I used a silent teleporter wad someone wrote a while back, and it
crashes the current version of Boom in P_SetThingPosition(), before Boom
even switches into graphics mode. The wad worked around a month ago. [Nodes
were unbuilt]

Fixed a bug with 2s normal textures not having correct lighting when under
water or over fake ceilings. The control sector's lighting wasn't being used
when it should. Another bug currently not fixed, which is not a showstopper,
is that 2s normals are not correctly clipped against water or fake ceilings,
and hence they bleed. Some might like that as an effect, and they can still
do that, but that's not what I designed 242 for. Fixing this has nothing to
do, by the way, with fixing it generally -- wads that use it as a special
effect continue to work, as the special clipping only comes into play when
242 is used.

Note: the sector heights are always taken from the real sector when
displaying 2s normals, because otherwise 'anomolies' may arise which cannot
be solved with sidedef offsets. Thus 2s normals are always "anchored" to the
real ceiling, not a fake one which can change based on player position.

Fixed another ?bad merge? in r_data.c, causing seg faults (invasio2.wad).
Problem was 'x1' was being used when 'x' should have been used, and if x1<0
this could cause seg faults (the code already made sure x >= max(0,x1)).
Looks like another simple typo I made, or something like that :)

Changed adaptive_gametics option to realtic_clock_rate option. Now user can
set speedup rate as a percentage in realtic_clock_rate, and it does not
change during the game (no "molasses" effect). By default it's 100% which is
normal speed. Removed -DADAPTIVE_GAMETIC from the makefile, as obsolete.

4/13/98:

Fixed ?bad merge? in r_data.c causing seg faults.

Added -DADAPTIVE_GAMETIC to makefile to enable adaptive speedup (attempts
to make Boom run at 35 fps on slow systems by scaling up the gametic clock).

4/12/98:

Fixed sprite clipping problem under fake ceilings.

Fixed problem drawing underwater sectors' ceilings while the player is
over fake ceiling.

Updated dckboom.txt, added watermap.wad to allow DCK users to enter WATERMAP
as a texture name.

4/11/98:

Made 242 linedef smarter, by ignoring missing or bad colormap names that are
valid textures. If you use a texture name on a 242 linedef, the texture, not
the colormap, definition applies. Some wads, such as DFA's (Dark King), had
HOM because they used ordinary walls in the room for 242 linedefs. This is
okay now, since ordinary COLORMAP is used and the textures are drawn
normally now. Only if a valid colormap name is given for a 242 linedef's
first side's textures, do those textures get replaced with "-" now.

Made no-clipping objects (e.g. player) not block objects moving on a conveyor
(it might mess up some conveyors if a player cheats and things start piling
up because the player blocks them but isn't moved by the conveyor). Objects
pass right through player in no-clipping mode if they are MF_SOLID objects
otherwise blocked by the player. This does not affect projectiles, e.g.
rockets hitting the player.

Added linedef type 261 to set ceiling light level, since there was already
one to set the floor light level, but not ceiling. With this linedef type,
you can now set the walls, things, floor, and ceiling light levels all
independently (well, all but one wall, I think :)

Added linedef types 262-264 to carry objects hanging from ceilings, just
like normal conveyors. For Phase 1 the code is commented out since it
doesn't work correctly yet. Doom is apparently not prepared to handle moving
ceiling-hanging things. But 262-264 have been reserved for this function,
which mimicks the behavior of conveyors for floors.

Added support for translucent 2s normals. Most of the support was already
present -- the same routine that is used to draw sprites, is used to draw 2s
normals. With Medusa 100% out of the way now, enhanced 2s normals seemed
appropriate.

No new flags are added to linedefs, patches, or textures -- like most of my
other linedefs, translucent textures work under a "property transfer" model,
where one linedef affects one or more objects, in this case 2s normal
textures on linedefs.

Linedef type 260 causes the linedef itself to be translucent with the
TRANMAP lump if the tag==0, while if the tag!=0, linedef type 260 causes
all tagged lines to be translucent, and the filter used is either the
one specified by the first sidedef's normal texture (which means each
translucent linedef can have its own translucency filter), or TRANMAP if
the first sidedef's normal texture isn't a valid translucency map filter
lump name.

I very much prefer the property transfer approach to the flags approach:

1) No wad format changes.

2) No new editor or utility support required, as long as it groks
   overloaded texture names and new linedef types.

3) Can be applied to more than one object, by using tags.

4) Allows effects to be independent of the definitions of the objects they
   affect -- for example, linedef 260's use of the property transfer model
   means that any 2s normal textures can be made translucent, not just new
   textures constructed with new special flags.

5) Can apply other information, such as from overloaded sidedefs and their
   sectors -- allows the transfer of dynamic properties (e.g. displacement
   and accelerative scrollers react to moving sectors).

There was talk at some time in TeamTNT about translucent textures and/or
patches being defined by new flags. Considering the ease of implementing
linedef 260, against the difficulty of making textures or patches always
translucent by definition, 260 seemed the only reasonable way. Disadvantages
of the flags approach:

1) Requires wad format changes unless some flags found unused in Doom are used.

2) Requires special editor / utility support to recognize and modify the new
   flags.

3) If individual patches are allowed to be translucent, they take special
   handling to merge when making multipatched textures. This would basically
   require rewriting the code which fixed Medusa, and it would be more than
   3x as complicated since it would have to actually "draw" translucently
   to form multipatched textures -- very ugly code.

4) Makes specifying translucency filter much harder. With this property-
   transferring approach, an arbitrary filter can be part of the effect.
   If textures or patches were made translucent by definition, they would
   either be restricted to one filter, or another significant wad format
   change would be needed to allow translucency filters to be specified
   individually for each patch or texture.

The amount of coding needed to add 2s normal translucency to what we had
already, took me only around 90 minutes to implement, and since there's such
a big demand for it, and it doesn't require wad format changes or any editor
changes other than a new linedef type, it seemed right. It will certainly
make more people happy. ~90 minutes is all it took, so it's not a big
change.

Much more time, over 8 hours, was spent making sure water worked as
expected under all kinds of conditions.

Unless linedef 260 is actually used in wads, the risk of this change is
almost zero. No new code was added to actually do the translucent drawing --
all I had to do, was enable the use of the R_DrawTLColumn() instead of
R_DrawColumn() when a translucent 2s normal was being drawn, and to transfer
the translucency property to the linedef, similar to how linedef 242 already
transferered properties to sectors (just one more 'case' in a switch).

Fixed deep water to work properly with lots of varying underwater floor and
ceiling height and texture changes. Prevented HOM, bleeding, disappearing
textures, and inconsistent sprite clipping. Tested it with a strange water
floor height pattern like this:

        -----                   -----
       |     |                 |     |
  -----       -----       -----       -----       -------
 |                 |     |                 |     |       |
 |                  -----                   -----        |
  --        ---                  ----                    |
    |      |   |                |    |                   |
     ------     ---------------       -------------------

All the water levels displayed correctly with no bleeding or HOM, both under
and over water. The correct halves of sprites were displayed, and they did
not disappear suddenly.

Translucent flats is all that remains to do for water. It's not as trivial
as translucent 2s normals, because unlike translucent 2s normals,
translucent flats requires that we do something never done before in Doom:
divide space into two at the water level. If the player is under water,
everything above the water level must be drawn first, then the water must be
drawn translucent, and then everything underwater must be drawn. If the
player is over water, the opposite order must be done. It's basically like
adding a 3-d component to Boom's BSP (Binary space partition). Also, while
the current water allows water height changes to occur, and fill them with
upper and lower textures, those textures are not translucent, nor is it
probably ever going to be practical to make them so. So if and when
translucent flats are done, existing water won't be able to be fully
translucent unless it's very simple (one water level). Translucent flats
must be applied with the same care and consistency as these others effects
I've added, so it's is a Phase II item. Sorry, no MAP30 -16 hacks :)

4/10/98:

Added adpative gametic option if -DADAPTIVE_GAMETIC is used. This may help
game fps on slower machines, but I cannot test it, since I get 35fps whether
I use it or not. It's an option turned off by default even if it's compiled
into Boom, so its risk is extremely low. Need others to test it on slow
systems, or anyone who is getting lower fps performance with Boom compared
to Doom.

Fixed -fast idclev bug (a Doom bug too, BTW). Now the state of fastparm is
remembered and the state tics are never doubled or halved twice. No state
cycles occur in MAP16 anymore, but even if they were to, they would not hang
Boom.

4/9/98:

Added state cycle detection algorithm. MAP16 still has the problem it had
before with -fast and idclev16, but now instead of locking up Boom, a
message appears: "Warning: State Cycle Detected", and except for the
Spectres remaining asleep because their wakeup frames have a cycle that
cannot be exited in any defined state, the game continues as usual. This
means Boom is now idiot-proof against state transition table cycles that
lock up the game.  No significant performance impact.

4/8/98:

Analyzed MAP16 -fast bug, determining it was a state cycle -- when a Spectre
near the red key or in the "cave" wakes up upon seeing the player near the
nukage, the game hangs in an infinite state-loop, because the tics are 0.
One problem, for sure, is that the tic counts are halved more than once when
idclev is used. When a frame state tic count is 0, the next state is handled
immediately, so at least one non-zero tic state must eventually be reached
or there will be a cycle which will hang Boom (this is a Doom bug too, BTW).

Fixed Medusa bug for 2s transparent normals. Now Medusa is 100% fixed.

Fixed Icarus MAP02 problem, which was a texture column offset overflow.
Doom only used 16-bit offsets for multipatched texture column offsets,
which was insufficient for Icarus. Adding 5 bytes per column to Boom's
multipatched columns, to fix Medusa, made the 64K limit get exceeded in
Boom when it didn't in Boom. Fix was simple -- use 32-bit offsets.

4/7/98:

Simplified the P_CheckSector() traversal algorithm to use simple markers
instead of complicated counters. The only advantage the counters have is
that they avoid having to initializations each step, but we have to do that
anyway, I think, to be safe.

Fixed the problem with the disappearing things, happening on CASLOTR and
probably other wads as well. Problem was an incorrect BSP optimization,
sometimes missing the drawing of things. One of my hunches was right :)

Fixed the problem with HOM in beginning of earth.wad MAP05 -- it's using
AASHITTY alright, but apparently, the sky effect works anyway despite this,
so long as a certain clipping decision is made (it's sort of like the
difference between a closed door and a 1s linedef -- what do you draw in
such a case if it's a 2s linedef that has AASHITTY as an upper texture, but
has F_SKY1 ceiling on both sides?). Anyway, I removed a very minor change
which I made eariler which "bailed out" in certain 1s line cases, so now,
earth.wad, despite having AASHITTY textures, displays sky background
correctly on MAP05. Second hunch right :)

Also took the time to do a minor optimization trick.

Files affected: r_bsp.c r_segs.c

Analyzed the MAP06 bullet puff problem and determined it's actually due to
P_CheckSector(). If you use the old code you get bullet puffs on the way
down the elevator, but if you use the new code you don't. Someone else needs
to look more at this -- I don't have the time right now. The disappearing
bullet puffs seem to have something to do with how the sectors_thinglist
itself is updated or used. The problem only happens when the elevator is
actually moving, which is why it involves P_CheckSector().

4/5/98

Found that significant performance regression was being caused by recent
changes to d_main.c, which unconditionally redraw the status bar. Makes
the status bar get drawn every frame, lowering the game's effective fps.

Fixed problem by reinstating code which intelligently avoids redrawing the
status bar, and by fixing the drawing problem by setting inhelpscreens=true
when the setup menus are entered. The inhelpscreens variable was designed
just for this purpose -- to redraw the status bar when a full screen was
entered. Future setup screens need to set this variable as well.

Gives a 10-20% performance boost to Boom overall fps.

Also moved SETUP to be a sub-option of OPTIONS (only a two-line change --
see comments below).

4/4/98

Updated boom.txt and boomref.txt with colormap and demo_insurance
information.

Note: I strongly suggest "SETUP" be moved to a sub-menu of "OPTIONS". The
menu is stretching the limits of its height now with the extra entry (it's
bleeding into the status bar), and having "SETUP" and "OPTIONS" in the same
main menu sounds redundant and/or vague -- sort of like having "options",
"configure", "parameters", "setup", etc. all in the same place. At the
highest menu level, I think there should be only one entry having to do with
"options". The other can be made a sub-part of it. I prefer SETUP to be a
sub-part of "OPTIONS".

Current, wind and friction should also be allowed for non-players, IMO.
Conveyors, and my version of currents, certainly are.

Fixed problem with sector_thinglist and CheckSector(), by rescanning the
list every time a new thing is processed, thus avoiding any problems if
nodes are inserted or deleted in arbitrary fashion during their
processing. Nodes are marked "valid" after they are processed, using a
scheme similar to Doom's existing validcount scheme. The list is scanned for
the first "invalid" thing, which is marked "valid" and processed, and then
the list is scanned again from the start for another "invalid" thing, etc.,
until no more "invalid" things exist to process. This scheme is used in some
OS protocols, and is tightly robust.

Fixed doubled messages in the menu selections. ("Press Y or N. Press Y or
N.", "Press a key to continue. Press a key to continue."). The PRESS*
messages were appended to the main messages in d_deh.c, even though they
apparently didn't need to be. Nightmare Skill, End Game, and several other
options had queries that came up twice.

Detected a 40 fps slowdown since last week, due to some unknown change.
(-fastdemo crusher went down from 580 to 540 fps on my machine). This is a
significant performance hit, and so Rez isn't imagining things :)

It could just be due to cache alignment -- info.c gets updated with new data
often, and so it may affect the alignment of code and/or data in the cache,
affecting performance by even this much. djgpp doesn't have very good cache
alignment options, though. The rewritten z_zone memory allocator, BTW,
always allocates memory on cache boundaries, but it's code that's probably
involved here -- tight renderer loops might be spanning two cache lines when
they only need one, thus lowering prefetch bandwidth.

Tried changing code alignment and could not detect performance improvement.
Problem is hard to isolate, but definitely occurred sometime last week after
my changes of Tuesday. Performance hit is probably 10%+ on low-end machines.
It is measured with crusher.lmp using demo_compatibility=true, so it
probably isn't any changes involving sector_thinglists.

Added more support for dynamic colormaps. Colormaps can be defined between
C_START and C_END (COLORMAP is predefined regardless of whether it appears
between C_START and C_END, for compatibility reasons). Linedef type 242 can
specify colormaps for when the player is below the fake floor, above the
fake ceiling, and in normal space, based on the names of the lower, upper,
and normal textures of the 242 linedef's first sidedef.

A C_START / C_END delimited list was more practical than a totally dynamic
solution (arbitrary lump names being allowed in sidedefs), because there is
a lot of colormap processing that must be performed at game startup and is
not performed again during level startup, and we need to know the names of
the colormaps ahead of time, which is not available without the level's
references, or some other list. C_START / C_END seemed appropriate and it
works just like F_START / F_END and S_START / S_END.

The colormaps are referenced internally by every sector, and might later be
made to change in real-time.

Right now the dynamic colormaps alter everything the viewer sees -- they do
not simply change things seen from a particular sector. Doing sector-by-
sector colormaps which are viewer-independent, is harder and should wait
until Phase II. Doom's colormap was for light goggles, invulerability,
etc., and so it was viewer-centered.

Note: editors may need to be modified to allow undefined textures to be
entered. Overloading sidedefs with names other than texture names, is a
practical method which doesn't require drastically new editor support. Some
editors, such as DCK, may be fooled into accepting the colormap names as
textures, by creating and loading fake TEXTURE1 lumps, without real textures
or patches in them.

Fixed deep water / fake ceiling effect (242) to allow player to see steps
underwater, and to draw it more consistently.

Modified carriers to carry no-gravity things at any height, if under water
(so lost souls etc. get carried by currents just like other things on
floors).

Fixed minor bugs in d_deh.c which could cause seg faults. Undefined pointer
comparisons were being done -- it's undefined to compare two C pointers for
their relative order, unless they point to elements INSIDE the same array,
or they point to one element past the right END of the array. If, say, a
pointer used in a loop, decrements one element BEFORE the beginning of the
array, then its comparison with the array's address is undefined, and the
loop might not terminate correctly. BTW: Another of these bugs, which did
cause crashes, was also in Doom, in the renderer code which draws 2s
normals, but that was fixed by me in January.

4/2/98

Fixed weapons switching problem which prevented selecting a weapon w/o
any ammo.

Analyzed and (hopefully) fixed DM spawn problem, caused by changes to
PIT_CheckThing to allow non-solid objects to pass through solid ones.

Fixed problem with netgame sync caused by not properly initializing RNG
(the -net command-line parameter should have been tested instead of
netgame, which isn't set early enough).

3/31/98

Fixed bug in deep water sprite clipping which caused the wrong half of the
sprite to be clipped sometimes.

3/30/98

Addressed RNG concerns by giving the user the choice. By default nothing
special is done, but if they want to, they can take out a Boom demo
insurance policy :) demo_insurance is the config file option. Whatever
they use, it's part of WriteOptions()/ReadOptions() and hence must be
saved in demos and savegames, as well as netgames.

Could not get perfect blockmap algorithm finished, due to health and other
factors :( Hacked in a very slow algorithm though (the same one used in BSP,
in fact). Takes 5 seconds or so on large E3 levels, on my fast machine, so
it's not as fast as one might expect :(

I don't like this hack, but I don't like the pressure to fix the blockmap
limit for phase 1, so I did this hack just to get it over with. It needs a
real fix, which this isn't. A real fix takes a long time (perhaps 3 weekends
full-time work), designing the equations and testing the blockmap builder.
Almost every Doom node builder has used the algorithm mentioned in the UDS,
which is slow.  I have a much better algorithm in mind, but it doesn't work
yet and I have to carefully design it, which takes lots of R&D time with
few quick results in the interim.

I was right -- I did double the blockmap limit earlier -- but from 64K to
128K.  Doom was limited to a 64K blockmap, but the wad format allowed
128K. And yes, Doom was considering the offsets as signed, but they were
offsets in words, not in bytes, so they were divided by two implicitly. It
certainly explains why one of my test wads works with Boom but crashes both
Doom and with Boom before my changes last time, which increased it to 128K
(instead of 64K as I had first thought).

Fixed seg fault when starting a new game in the middle of a demo. Stan's
change last time fixed DM spawning, but broke games started after DM demo
playback. We MUST set deathmatch and netgame to 0 when starting a new game.

Aparently, the problem was that the G_ReloadDefaults() call in d_main.c
comes AFTER the DM parameters are set according to the command-line -- if
the call to G_ReloadDefaults() came before the DM parameters were set, we'd
be okay. So I've taken every call to G_ReloadDefaults() except the one in
d_main.c, and added deathmatch=0 and netgame=0 after each one. Those are
required in every other place. Remember, this is a "Reload" of the defaults,
something normally done at the beginning of a new game started by the user.
Netgames can't normally be interrupted like that by a user anyway, but demos
can.

G_ReloadDefaults() must come after M_LoadDefaults() is called, and after
some other parameters are set -- Boom will stop working if you move it up
too early.

Improved random number generator to be more random.

3/29/98:

Fixed incorrect order of quit message (s_DOSY was put in the wrong order).

Updated linedefs.txt, correcting some errors in the scrollers/underwater
linedef specs.

For some reason I was sick (allergies).

3/28/98:

Made intermission teletype start off at normal speed, accelerating only when
the use/fire keys are used. Rand's time delays for Doom 1 are still used,
in that if you press use/fire once, you get the faster speed and then the
longer wait. But you can accelerate the wait too, to move on immediately.
It's just like the kills/items/secrets screen now. Doom 2 had to be
considered also, but it always waits for the user to press a key before it
moves on to the next level anyway -- now, it allows the intermission text
to be accelerated with one use/fire, and then the next level is entered
with the next use/fire.

Fixed deep water sprite clipping. Now things are properly clipped both under
and over water, and also across fake ceilings. Took an unusually long time
to do, and seemed much harder than it really was, simply because of a
compiler bug which caused mysterious seg fault crashes -- three hours were
spent trying to fix a bug that wasn't mine, and it looked so bad under a
debugger: entire structs being clobbered, but no routine but my own, which
simply sets a tiny field, was being detected as writing to the structs after
startup. I tried something slightly different but semantically the same, and
the problem went away immediately and I got almost perfect sprite clipping
on my first try -- so it seemed it was a compiler bug, though I'm not going
to try and track it down any more (that's what I spend a lot of my regular
work doing, BTW <g>).

3/27/98:

Changed the IDDT cheat to work more like in Doom.

Prevented weapon recoil from affecting player in no-clipping mode, since all
other external motion is already disabled in no-clipping mode, and many
times no-clipping is used to keep the player from moving, even when firing
weapons.

Fixed conveyor bug in which conveyors would carry objects hanging over ledges,
but not touching the conveyor.

Fixed bug in new sector/thing lists, in which a linedef's 2s flag was being
used to test for two-sidedness. Tested second sidedef instead of the 2s
flag.  Original implementation prevented conveyors and other movers from
working on objects which are touching moving sectors, but whose centers are
on the non-moving sides of non-2s two-sided linedefs. 2s implies two-sided,
but two-sided does not imply 2s.

For some things like lost soul spawning, the 2s flag is still used as the
test, for compatibility reasons. But since this sector/thing list is new, we
should do it right the first time, and take the linedef's two-sidedness into
account rather than the 2s flag. Jim has already done this for the floor
changers, among other things.

3/26/98:

Fixed weapon switch bug, in which the player had to be firing their weapon
in order for it to switch properly when it ran out of ammo.

Improved random number generator. Demos now save RNG seed (4 bytes long),
and every new game scrambles the seed based on the system clock and other
fairly random variables.

Fixed spawnfrag bug. Only in god mode (not merely an invulnerability orb), and
only if compatibility mode is turned off, are spawnfrags disabled.

Discovered savegame crash bug in MAP30 (and all other boss spawn levels),
was actually a Doom bug which previously caused all icon landings to be
forgotten across savegames. Since they were forgotten, and since we made
them dynamic in Boom to remove any limit, the list of icon landings was
pointed by a NULL pointer, causing seg faults. Solution is to initialize the
icon landings during level startup, instead of during boss wake-up. Doom
worked only by accident because it also put the boss to sleep during
savegames. Since we don't put monsters to sleep across savegames anymore in
Boom, the brain was trying to spawn a monster into a NULL-pointed-to list of
landings, hence the seg fault.  Fix also required saving the boss brain's
state in the savegame, such as which icon landing it was last targeting when
the game was saved.

3/22/98:

Fixed the problem Rez noticed with demos such as "g:caslotr", in which no
leading (back)slash appears before a filename, but only a drive letter.

Fixed what looked like another Allegro bug (not sure), which was preventing
the right shift key from working with the new keyboard interrupt handler.
Sometimes the arrow keys generate extended scancodes which, un-extended,
look like releases of the shift keys. Previously, you had to "pump" the
right shift key to get to work, because the section of Allegro code which
filtered out useless extended scancodes (such as this fake release of the
right shift key), did not consider this case. Now it does.

Historical note: Our problems with Allegro are not unique in gaming. Recall
how the right shift key had to be "pumped" in one of the alpha versions of
Doom, too. Also recall that sometimes on exit, the shift state was reversed.
Finally, recall how the sound code, in particular GUS, was such a problem.
If anyone can come up with a perfect game library that works on every major
sound card and has no keyboard hassles, they can make a lot of money :)

Looked at weapons switching and determined that for demos, weapons switches
which were involuntary in Doom, e.g. always switching to SSG first if you
had it and you selected the shotgun, or switching to another weapon when
you run out of ammo, are NOT broadcast across networks or demos, just as I
had originally suspected.

Fixed weapons switching problem by moving all the weapons-switching code
from p_user.c and p_pspr.c into g_game.c's G_BuildTiccmd() function. In
demo_compatibility mode the old method is still used. There may be some
slight differences or "gotchas" that I missed, such as different response
times or different weapon switching behavior, but that's a small price paid
for having consistency across demos and networks. I'm sure it can be fine-
tuned to be more like original Doom if someone finds something odd with it.
I played a few levels of Doom 1 with it, losing ammo several times, and I
did not notice anything unusual.

Now demos and netgames can have different player weapons preferences without
it causing sync problems, because the weapons changes are stored in the
demos or broadcast across the network, instead of being a part of the
thinker code.

The thinker code was used in Doom to change the weapons when the player
ran out of ammo or chose a shotgun or fist, when a SSG or chainsaw was
available.  These changes were governed by an arbitrary, yet fixed, set
of preferences.  They were "involuntary" weapons switches, in that sense.

Think of the thinker code as the involuntary weapons changes, while the
G_BuildTiccmd code is the voluntary weapons changes. With variations now
possible in involuntary weapons changes (across different players and demo
recordings), we must treat them as variables just like voluntary weapons
changes, and record them as such.

I was able to record a demo under one set of preferences, and then change
the preferences and play the same demo back just okay, something that was
not possible in 0316's build. Files: p_pspr.c, p_user.c, g_game.c
significantly changed.

Now this needs real testing across network. It needs to be tested with
players having very different weapons preferences, and with them running
out of those weapon's ammo during firing, and also of using the '3' and
'1' keys often.

3/21/98:

Fixed savegame crash Paul Schmidt was experiencing. Problem was that
savegame buffer could be reallocated, but a local copy of save_p in
P_ArchiveWorld() would still use an old value of save_p. If a reallocation
occurred, save_p would become invalid and memory would be overwritten,
causing unpredictable results.

Changed Makefile so that modified Allegro sources are built as a part of
Boom.  Object files which are linked as a part of Boom will always be linked
in and take precedence over the buggy liballeg.a objects they are supposed
to replace.  Thus linking in Boom's keyboard.o causes liballeg.a's
keyboard.o to be ignored.

Added interrupt-driven keyboard IO. No longer is Allegro's key[] array
polled, so performance on low-end systems should improve significantly,
and response should be faster overall. Allegro is still used to maintain
keyboard sanity and handle LEDs etc., but there's a new callback mechanism
added to Allegro, which allows scancodes to be passed directly to Boom or
any other program.  Boom stores these scancodes in a FIFO queue and does not
process them any more than it needs to in the interrupt routine.

As a side benefit of rewriting the keyboard routine, autorepeat works again
in the savegame menu and other places.

Comment: Many Allegro routines look like they were written by non-systems
programmers, because interrupts often have lots of code in them that they
shouldn't -- for example, it's better to just queue raw data in an interrupt
handler and process it later in a non-interrupt handler, instead of doing
all sorts of operations or conversions on the data in the interrupt handler
itself -- Allegro's keyboard interrupt handler has a loop in it that counts
an index from 1 to 128, looking for matching table entries. Also, interrupt
masks are applied inconsistently in Allegro and may cause problems such as
that "keyboard starvation" problem which set_leds(-1) caused by not properly
masking interrupts. Also, the AWE32 midi driver's use of floating point
registers inside an interrupt handler without saving and restoring the FP
state properly, is another blatant example. One gets the impression that
Allegro's authors have never programmed interrupts, device drivers, or any
kind of programming that depends on understanding multitasking issues.

Fixed idclip bug. Original bug was caused by following the bad advice of one
of the comments (a "fixme" comment which actually breaks the idclip cheat).

Added bin2c program, for adding predefined lumps and such.

Added new colormap for underwater effect. WATERMAP is the same format as
COLORMAP except it's used when the player is underwater. Took a little work
rearranging the colormap-handling code so that more than one colormap could
be used. Now the structure is in place for an arbitrary number of colormaps.
Right now the colormap used is not the best -- if anyone can come up with a
better default I'll welcome it.

Discovered problem with savegame checksum was that garbage was being left in
the length fields of the F_START/F_END/S_START/S_END markers. Doesn't usually
matter since these are markers, but it affected checksum. For robustness, I
forced them to length 0 in the merge routine.

3/20/98:

Fixed problem with weapons pickup not being heard in spy mode. Fixed a lot
of Doom hacks that were scattered around id's sound-generating code, such as
fixing the origins of sounds to be the player doing the action rather than
NULL (which is generally heard throughout the entire level by everyone).

Worked around loadgame checksum bug. Apparently the sizes of the lumps
loaded from wads are not consistent from run to run. This calls for more
investigation, and may point to the cause of other crashes.

Fixed -loadgame bug, the cause of which was being masked by the checksum
failure. The -loadgame bug was simply the result of finishing the loadgame
code without loading a full game (due to a checksum error), and then
proceeding to play anyway.

Changed carrying floor thinker to use new sector thing lists, and to carry
objects if they are under water, yet above real floor level.

3/18/98:

Worked with Jim in tracking down YAAB (Yet Another Allegro Bug <g>). Allegro
keyboard code did not properly mask interrupts during low-level keyboard IO.

Fixed tiny bug in currently-unused linedef/thing intersection routine -- the
radius used in a calculation was off by a factor of 2.

3/15/98:

Improved sound effects when listening from another player's view in spy mode.

Added user-friendly savegame check. Savegame checksum is weak, simply taking
the lump names and sizes into account. If Boom detects a checksum mismatch, a
message is printed and any pwads which were loaded when the game was saved,
are listed. The user can override the warning by loading the same slot twice.

NOTE: found a -loadgame bug which happens most with "-loadgame 0" after memory
has been used by another big process -- seems to indicate something's uninit,
specifically, the player's mobj. "-loadgame 0" sometimes segfaults. Need more
time to isolate and fix, but am willing to entertain others looking at it :)

Since some interest in having lava always bright was expressed in the betatest
group, I added another linedef type which can be used to set the light level
of a sector's floor independently. Thus a sector with light 255 can be used
to set the floor light level of a sector containing lava to be always 255.

Fixed the bug Len Pitre mentioned regarding the conveyors, where corpses were
unable to move through solid objects including monsters, depsite monsters being
able to move through corpses. Problem was an asymmetry in the thing<->thing
collision checks.

Optimized thing/linedef intersection query algorithm. Added it to p_maputl.c
for possible future use. Algorithm never requires division, and requires four
multiplications maximum, zero multiplications if the thing is outside the
linedef's bounding box. C code is small, and assembly output verified to be
nearly optimal (no register spills and very few redundant register copies).

3/14/98:

Investigated bleeding ceilings and concluded that without major changes to
the renderer, Paul Schmitz's bridges cannot be done with linedef type 242 as
hoped.

Improved underwater effects to support different light levels and textures
underwater.

Added accelerative scrollers. Five new linedef types have the same functions
as the constant scrollers and the scrollers which move in response to sector
height changes, except that the five new ones are accelerative. With the
addition of a floor or ceiling height changer which alternates between two
heights, an on/off scroller is possible (the heights don't matter and it
doesn't matter whether the floor or ceiling changes).

In response to complaints about scrolling floors not being able to push things
over ledges, added ability for monsters and other things to be pushed off of
tall ledges in non-compatibility mode. Monsters cannot jump off of tall ledges
voluntarily, but projectiles, conveyors (constant pushers), and player gunfire
can push monsters off of ledges.

Currently this is not a separate option and simply goes under "compatibility,"
because the gameplay is not too much different -- most monsters (and barrels)
that a player can push over a ledge, do not have much strength to begin with
and die before they can be pushed over the ledge. Stronger monsters are more
massive and thus harder to push over a ledge. While playing a few Doom 2
levels with lots of structures, such as MAP11-15, I did not notice too much
difference -- only every once and a while did a monster get knocked over a
ledge by my gunfire without dying.

If it is ever made into a separate option, it MUST be stored in G_SaveOptions /
G_LoadOptions in g_game.c or else Boom demos will not stay in sync.

This option to knock objects over ledges took very little work to implement,
since it was simply a matter of conditionally disabling a check in P_TryMove()
when the movement was not monster AI but was due to outside forces.

3/8/98:

Updated common.cfg and doom17.dat with the new linedef types.

Fixed missing DPMI lock in the sound code. Two locks were needed -- I had
only locked one of them.

Added even more generalized scrollers. Now any sector's floor or ceiling
motion can be converted into wall, floor, or ceiling scroll motion, or
object motion.

A Doom vending machine is possible now, among other things :)

Vectors are represented by linedefs to give the designer maximum
flexibility.

The only thing not completed is the ability to turn continuous scrolling on
and off.

Renumbered linedef types for silent teleporters so that 5 new scroller
linedef types could be made consecutive with the 5 constant-speed
scrollers. There are now 10 generalized scrolling linedef types: ceiling
tex, floor tex, floor object carrying, floor tex & floor object carrying,
and wall tex.

Added explicit deep water / invisible platform support. A sector's floor or
ceiling texture height can now be set independently of its actual height, by
tagging it to another sector with a special linedef type (242). A linedef
type #242 causes all tagged sectors to get their flats drawn at the heights
of the sector on the 242 linedef's first side. This avoids having to use
special sidedef sector references to get deep water, and allows deep water
to span concave polygons (previously if a polygon was concave, deep water
would be messed up easily and was exteremely dependent on the nodes).

Added VERY primitive underwater support as part of linedef type
#242. Whenever the player is below the height of the floor indicated by
#242, the floor is drawn all around them and above them. As a special case,
if all lowers are missing in a sector underneath the water, a "cloudy" water
effect appears.  This change allows water to go much deeper than it could
under Doom.

3/7/98:

Fixed messed up help screen sequences again, this time with the new help
screens. Help screens must be tested on Doom 1 Registered, Doom 2, and
Ultimate Doom, at a minimum, and the "Read This" main menu option should
also be tested. The new help screens were appearing twice or in the wrong
places some times. #ifdef LEESFIXES is around these changes.

Fixed disappearing imp bug on E3 MAP02. Bug existed since Jan. 1 version and
was caused by roundoff error in a point/line query. I'm not sure it's really
a Boom bug, since the wad and/or nodes seem very suspicious when the imp's
visibility is so sensitive to a point/line query's roundoff error, but for
compatibility this is being fixed.

Based on disappearing imp bug on E3 MAP02, and a re-analysis of the performance
impact of quick dot-product checks, I decided to bring back the old functions
for point/line queries rather than use new inline macros which use floating
point. For some low-end users the old functions may be faster; the new method
requires at least 48 bytes of RAM extra per linedef, probably more; tiny
roundoff differences cause problems like the disappearing imp bug on E3 MAP02,
and the performance impact of switching between the old and new methods is
negligible on my system and probably other higher-end systems.

Fixed spy mode so that the status bar and HUD reflect the player being watched.
I could only test it with multiplayer demos, so I need someone to test it
some more under real co-op play. Sound is also heard from the other player's
location, but the support for it is not perfect right now -- some minor
differences exist between what a player hears in spy mode and what they would
hear if they actually were that player, such as weapons fire. This is due to
the fact that Doom made a lot of assumptions and took shortcuts that only work
with the console player, such as using NULL pointers to represent the origins
of sounds coming from the console player.

3/6/98:

Added translucency map caching, because the range of tastes is too broad
to only include 50% and 66% in the exe. Translucency map cache automatically
detects changes in filter percentage or even the PLAYPAL lump it's based on.
"tranmap.dat" is written in Boom's executable directory. If there are any
errors attempting to create the cache file, Boom simply recomputes the
translucency map. More initialization dots, and a progress indicator, were
added to show the progress when a cache miss occurs, since it may take up to
10 seconds on slow machines.

Fixed problems with CapsLock and related keys, using, of all things, Allegro :)
(there is no need to mess with the BIOS data area directly as Allegro has
functions / variables to do this -- I think someone quoted me an outdated
article which said Allegro didn't allow you to do that stuff -- might have
been true in the past :).

Added two new config file variables:

1. autorun, which remembers the autorun state from the last time you ran Boom,
so that you don't have to turn autorun mode on each time.

2. leds_always_off, which tells Boom to keep the keyboard LEDs off while
a game is playing -- allows you to use CapsLock and other keys for Boom
functions without having their LEDs turn on.

Allowed CTRL-C to be used to abort Boom during startup init.

Fixed bug with revenant tracers being too random, while preserving demo sync.

3/5/98:

Fixed TNTEM cheat, once again, to get rid of every last lost soul :)
Sometimes requires killing PEs even after they are "dead".

Looked into DCK support -- DCK versions later than 2.2-f cannot handle
linedef types >= 256.

3/4/98:

Fixed infinite loop caused by two or more floor-carrying linedefs tagging the
same sector.

Fixed problem with config file defaults not being loaded during demos or
deathmatch.

Fixed problem with last pixel in translucent column not being drawn as
translucent.

3/2/98:

Isolated and fixed problem which was causing MAP19 crash in Eternal with v1.9
and all other versions -- the problem was that a 2s normal texture with large
magnitude y-offsets was being drawn incorrectly because an overflow occurred
in a texturemapping calculation. The overflow was not the symptom (this is
not an overflow exception or anything like that), but was the indirect cause.

Anytime an already-medium-to-large y-offset was scaled even larger due to the
proximity of the player to the texture, an overflow might occur. Doom simply
truncated the result to the 16.16 fixed-point precision of all its fixed-point
numbers, and relied on floor/ceiling clip ranges to clip 2s normals which were
out of range. But if the overflow occurred, the result could be the wrong sign
or worse, and so sometimes invariants Doom assumed were violated, causing it
to draw where it shouldn't and creating seg faults. The solution is simple:
perform the scaling in double-precision, but compare the double-precision
results to overflow first, and clip the entire column if it's out of range.
This amounts to testing whether the bottom end of the texture column is above
the top of the framebuffer, or whether the top end of the texture column is
below the bottom of the framebuffer.

MAP19 created the overflow because the player was near a tall column with a
2s normal (probably the flame animation) way up above. The height/distance
ratio is so huge (practically 90 degree tangent) that it causes the overflow.
But for the overflow to create a crash, means that holes in Doom's clipping
checks must be found, which is why it was nontrivial to reproduce.

There is less chance of this happening with sprites, and with the failsafes
I've added to the drawing routine it shouldn't happen anymore for 2s normals
or sprites.

Fixed v1.9 demo sync problem accidentally caused by new friction code -- added
demo_compatibility check under #ifdef LEESFIXES to compensate. Demo sync
problem did not show up in crusher.lmp or demo1,2,3, but occurs about midway
in a 100+ frag DM demo I use in my testing (it's the +10 units angle adjustment
used when hitting walls -- it breaks demo sync sometimes).

Added scrolling walls. One type of scrolling wall is programmed and
synchronized just like the scrolling floors, so that a player standing on a
horizontally scrolling floor which has been programmed with a linedef having
the same length and direction as the linedef programming a wall, will see
the wall standing still. This scrolling linedef type has constant speed, but
it can be arbitrary in direction and speed, so vertical scrolling is also
possible. This one is special, in that it's another linedef->linedef effect
(where one linedef operates on another linedef with the same tag), just like
the silent linedef->linedef teleporter.

Another scrolling linedef type, much simpler for the wad author to use,
sacrifices the use of the x- and y-offsets of the sidedef, and uses them as
the scrolling speeds. The loss of the offsets is not really a problem unless
you need to line it up with another scrolling linedef, or you need to line
it up horizontally or vertically when it scrolls in the orthogonal
direction, but in that case, you can be sure that all of the linedefs of
this type scrolling at the same speed have the same implicit x- and
y-offsets. For maximum freedom use the more complicated linedef type above.

There are so many options for scrolling, that it's probably best left to
scripting, but until then, wad authors will be wanting more options than
they have had in the past, so I've tried to make the options available far
and wide.

Supporting variable-rate or on/off scrolling, both for walls and for flats,
was too much work for me to do this weekend given the other changes. I spent
more time getting the scrolling flats and their mobj-carrying properties
working, than I did improving the scrolling walls, since I thought scrolling
flats would be more in demand since there's nothing like it before.

Supporting a sector controlling a texture's (or even a flat's) scroll speed
is possible, but it's more work -- the current code is nice and small
because the scroll speed is known to be constant. If we start supporting
variable scroll speeds, more fields will need to be added to the (internal)
linedef and/or sector structs if we are to have an efficient scrolling
algorithm, because instead of simply relying on a global scroll offset
counter which is scaled appropriately to each line's or flat's needs, we'd
have to modify the individual line's or flat's offsets during each gametic
based on the sector heights of the control sector at the moment, and to do
this without scanning all of the linedefs for specials during every gametic,
requires setting up a list of scrolling linedefs. In short, it's more work,
but it's possible.

Scrolling type 48 still works as before, as does Jim's reversed type 85.

Unless there are more serious bugs to fix, I guess I'll work on improving
the scrollers next weekend, perhaps by making it possible to turn them on
and off, have variable speed, etc.

3/1/98:

Changed automatic TRANMAP generator to only be called when translucency is
requested. If translucency is off, the startup delay will not happen. If the
cheat is then used, there will be a delay in the middle of the game while it
generates the table.

Cleaned up handling of game options (e.g. smart monsters, head bopping,
etc).  Added new function G_ReloadOptions() in g_game.c, which should be
used to reload any options with their runtime defaults so that games play
consistently.  G_ReadOptions() and G_WriteOptions() are used to load and
save the options from savegames and demos, without messing up the defaults
in the config file.  G_ReloadOptions() is therefore needed when starting a
new game, since a loaded savegame or demo might change the options from
their defaults. Moved Jim's command-line resetting (-nomonsters fix) to this
new function since it falls under the same usage.

Doubled blockmap limit. The previous blockmap limit was actually 32K, not
64K, because the blockmap offsets were being treated as signed instead of
unsigned.  The special marker -1 still needs to be sign-extended into -1,
but all other 16-bit values can be zero extended. Verified with a test wad
left over from my visplane research days -- it crashes both Doom and older
versions of Boom when a bullet is shot in a room surrounded by hundreds of
linedefs (not even in the same room), but with this new version of Boom, it
doesn't crash anymore.

Changed internal blockmap data structures to use 32-bit offsets everywhere.
Blockmap limitation is still a wad limitation, and I have ideas on how to
fix it (on-the-fly blockmap generation at runtime, or new a blockmap lump),
but those will have to wait. For now, enjoy the 64K limit instead of 32K
<g>.

Added generalized "options" block to both demos and savegames, to support
saving and loading options which significantly affect demos and which we may
want to be restored during savegames, such as player bobbing. Right now 256
bytes are reserved for this block, which can expand to up to 256 bytes
without requiring demo format changes.

Cloned variables <xxx> into default_<xxx> and loaded and saved <xxx> from
the savegames and demos, using default_<xxx> only for new games. These are
the options for over/under, bobbing, recoil, etc. The defaults should be
made separate from the actuals used, so that demos and savegames can load
values different from the user's own preferences, or turn the options off
completely in compatibility mode, without messing up their preferences, and
so that cheats can be used to change these flags at runtime without changing
the defaults.

Padded demo and savegame formats to include room for up to 32 players. <g>
This way, in case the number of players supported increases later, demo and
savegame compatibility won't be a problem. Right now the last 28 bytes are
always stored as 0 and are ignored when read.

2/28/98:

Added support for generalized scrolling floors. Floors and ceilings can be
scrolled at any direction and speed, and floors can carry objects on top of
them. A flowing river, or a conveyor belt, are both possible now. Four
linedef types were added to support it:

1) Ceiling scroller 2) Floor scroller 3) Floor "carrier" (carries all
objects on the sector's floor) 4) A combination of 2) and 3) in the same
speed and direction

No special sector types are necessary -- a tagged linedef controls the
effect.  The scrolling is in the same direction and magnitude as the
linedef, so usually one of the linedefs making up the edge of the sector
simply needs to be split and adjusted to the proper length to make the
scrolling flow neatly along the sector's edges.

The effects are cumulative, so with two or more linedefs tagged to the same
sector, any combination of floor, ceiling, and object-carrying effects can
be formed. The speed of a carrying floor does not even have to move at the
same speed as the floor. The fourth linedef type is equivalent to the sum of
the second and third, but is included for convenience, since I expect many
will want the floor to scroll and carry things at the same time and in the
same direction.

Tested with a conveyor belt, ala duke3d, and scrolling ceilings. Tuned it so
that momenta displacements are precisely equivalent to texture scrolling (1
pixel = 3/32 momenta). Works independently of Rand's pusher/friction
changes, but may be combined since the momenta are cumulative. Affects all
things which aren't floating, not just players. For objects such as trees
and pillars, which may not want to be carried (say, in a river), the wad
author can put a small sector in the middle of a larger scrolling one, and
lay the thing on top of it to avoid it being swept away by the currents.

The only problem right now is that <extremely> slow scrolling floors
sometimes "slip underneath" things which are on top of them (I don't know if
this is a bug or a feature <g>). If the scrolling speed is increased past a
certain point, or if the thing moves in the slightest, then the carrying
floor "catches" it and starts to carry it.

Note: as part of adding this scrolling flats effect, general intrastructure
support was added to the visplane code, to support arbitrary (x,y) offsets
in flats. In the future, this can be used to support (x,y) offsets applied
statically to flats, such as for aligning them when the 64x64 grid
limitation is removed.

Added config option to use traditional keys in the Doom status bar. Default
is off, so that the new "doubled" keys are shown, but if you should prefer
going back to the Doom keys, there's now a config switch to do so :)

Fixed the savegame bugs Rand had already analyzed: loadgames always coming
up in automap, and players getting stuck in walls. Tested stuck wall fix.
Added automap gridline status to the savegame. All that's left now as far as
automap status not being saved, is the zoom-in position and scale, but that
will take me too much time to do right now since it's not as simple to save
as the rest of the automap state, due to how it's implemented in am_map.c.

Added demo compatibility support for versions of Doom prior to v1.4, since
there appears to be a demand for it. <g> However, to support versions of
Doom prior to v1.4, will require lots of gamemode and/or other checks to be
added, since the STMINUS mentioned is only one of many such lumps missing in
pre-v1.4 and refererenced in post-v1.4. I think a lumpdiff is in order
(i.e. compare the lump directories of old and new versions and account for
all the differences). I have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue
this now.

As much as I like old versions of Doom (see my web page), I do not feel the
need to support them in Boom. Pre-v1.4 demos are almost certain to have sync
problems. Demos prior to version 1.2 are not even compatible with later demo
versions, even after the header is accounted for, because player movement
deltas are scaled differently (v1.1 demos play back on later versions, as
though the player is in turbo). I was able to play a demo from v1.2, and the
demo support for pre-v1.4 versions seems to work, since there are no seg
fault crashes or complete demo sync problems anymore, and the demo starts
off just fine, but there are all kinds of missing lumps which prevented the
demo from completing: STMINUS, WIMINUS (another intermission screen lump),
and probably many others. I fixed the problem with DSGETPOW sound lump not
being found, by simply muting out sound effects with missing lumps. If this
is too silent for y'all's tastes, and you want a message of some kind that a
sound lump is missing instead of no sound at all, I can either back out this
change or improve it to print a non-fatal error message. For now though,
missing sound lumps are simply not played back.

Fixed minor problem with ENDOOM -- the bug was simply that it was being
printed when it shouldn't. The backspace which caused the message to begin
in column 79 was intentional, because without this backspace, ENDOOM scrolls
one line off the screen. djgpp's DOS extender seems to print an extra
newline when the program finishes, so we have to backspace to hack around
this. Now ENDOOM is printed iff there is no exit message (such as a
-timedemo report or an error message).

2/26/98:

Fixed problem which caused linux version (and all DOS ports based on it) to
crash on Eternal MAP25 -- Thing type #0 was not being handled as a no-op,
and so memory was being corrupted. The symptoms were delayed, and bore
little relation to the cause (something common in these types of bugs <g>).

2/22/98:

Allow spy mode (F12) even during deathmatch demo playback, to allow you to
watch DM demos from any player's perspective.

Some minor tuning of the assembly routines.

2/21/98:

Judged that, with the new automatic TRANMAP filter generator mixing at 66%,
translucency looks good enough to be turned on for some sprites: monster
fireballs, BFG, and spherical items (especially the invisibility orb and
soul sphere -- brings new meaning to that 'eyeball' <g>). I turned it off
for the imp because the spheres are good enough examples now.

Added ENDOOM support (color text printed when game ends).

Stopped par times from being printed during modified games (pwads). If ever
DEH support for setting par times is added, this can be turned back on,
preferably turned on somehow in the DEH specification.

Commented out id copyright banners from startup screen ("modified game", "DO
NOT DISTRIBUTE", "Call the SPA", etc.)

Added key_screenshot customizable key, to allow screenshots in non-devparm
mode. Currently the best default I could think of to use was '*', which is
the * on the numeric keypad (I've heard of problems with using PrintScreen
since it's often already reserved as a hotkey by some OSes -- I believe
DOSDoom tried this and had to retract it later). Screenshots in non-devparm
mode are desirable for bug reporting since many people don't use devparm
when they need it, and savegames might not be good enough (the bug might go
away or might interfere with savegames).

Added general infrastructure for monster AI improvement flags, and
implemented first use of it with the recent monster memory improvent.

A monster_ai flag is loaded and saved across demos and savegames. An enum
list can be updated in one of the header files if additional flags need to
be added.

If any new monster AI features are to be added, they should be turned on/off
with bits in this new variable, to allow better customization of monster AI
options, and to ensure uniform results across demos and savegames. At some
point it might be something settable from pwads. No new config variables
need to be added if all that is needed is a monster-affecting on/off
flag. If the default needs to be changed, the default value of monster_ai in
m_misc.c should be formed based on bitwise OR-ing of the bitmask enums which
are to be turned on by default.

Digression...

Even if demo sync with v1.9 is not seen as being important, the issues are
almost the same with future versions of Boom as they are with preserving
demo compatibility with past versions of Doom, because the causes of desync
are the same and extra care must be taken. It is extremely important to save
compatibility-type switches in demos and savegames, because otherwise sync
problems WILL occur and we'll get lots of bug reports we'd rather not have.

As for the precedence of various options, I think any conflicts should be
resolved according to this precedence list:

Demo Savegame Command-line Pwad Iwad Config file

The command-line should not be overriden by a wad; the user should be able
to "exercise exceptions" on the command-line. However, a wad can override
the config file's defaults. A savegame being loaded is a different matter --
it may override the command-line since it's restoring an almost complete
state.  A demo may also override it, because a demo may need something for
it to stay in sync at all. The precedence list above is designed so that
exceptions are minimized, while giving wad author, user, etc. control, and
ensuring that the state of the game is preserved as much as possible,
barring explicit requests for exceptions.

I feel as strongly about the above list of precedences, as some do about
searching for wad files in the current working directory first :)

... End of digression.

Improved -timedemo and -fastdemo accuracy by preloading levels before timing
starts, and by sampling the clock as late as possible during the
initialization sequence. Verified with two consecutive runs of -fastdemo
crusher, which both returned the same "realtics" count.

Fixed secret percentage in intermission screens to indicate 100% if there
are no secrets. No more wondering why you got no secrets when there were
none.  "Computer Game Proves 0/0 = 1. Proof: Boom. QED." <g>

Relaxed compatibility switch on blockmap iterator change, to become
demo_compatibility. It's probably just a random number generator call count
issue (some line collision calcluations involve random number generation to
simulate friction).

On the subject of random number generators, I added a new pr_class for the
revenant tracers. Previously, the revenant tracers (tracking/non-tracking
missiles) were randomized based on the global gametics counter, being
tracking only 1/4 of the time on average. Since gametics could start out at
almost any value (mod 4) for internal demos, this is why revenants messed up
internal demos. If demo_compatibility is on, the old method is still used,
except that the global gametics counter is adjusted at the start of the demo
to make sure it has a canonical value of 0 mod 4. If demo_compatibility is
turned off, then the new pr_class and its associated random number generator
is used instead.

Made savegame version string to become proprietary: "version 200" becomes
"Boomver 200". This is just a way to prevent crashes in case someone else
calls theirs version 200 and someone loads their savegames.

Fixed internal demo sync problems (e.g. DEMO1 disappearing imp). Problem
seemed to be that demo_compatibility wasn't turned on early enough. Now
demo_compatibility is turned on at demo load time: when a Pre-2.0 demo is
detected, both the compatibility and demo_compatibility flags are forced on.
Otherwise, demo_compatibility is turned off, and the less strict
compatibility option is set to the user's default, and is saved and restored
in v2.0+ demos and savegames (it can still be changed during the game with a
cheat).

Now, demos recorded by the new engine are always recorded as v2.0 or higher,
and are not recorded with demo_compatibility turned on, because if they
were, they would lose the benefits of the new localized random number
generators which reduce the chances of demo sync failure, by making RNG
seeds local to each RNG caller.

v1.9 demo compatibility is much better now, although it's not 100% and I
don't expect it to ever be. Some v1.9 demos work perfectly now.

Removed limit on automap marks. Now more than 10 marks can be drawn.

Added automap information to savegame. Whether the automap is active,
whether follow mode is turned on, and the current state of the automap
marks, are all saved in savegames now.

Fixed help screen menu sequences. Previously the help, credit, and "ordering
info" screens were drawn in the wrong order w.r.t. F1 and "READ THIS". Also,
the skull icon was in the wrong place and covered some of the help screen's
text. Now the help menus emulate Registered Doom, Ultimate Doom, and Doom 2
as much as possible. Ultimate Doom needed the most work, since its help
screen (F1) turned up the credits screen instead.

Renamed "default.cfg" to "boom.cfg".

Converted R_DrawTLColumn to assembly language, #ifdef'ing out the C code.
Verified sufficient speedup.

Fixed badly behaving HUD display -- the HUD would turn on or off in
seemingly random ways when the screen sizes were changed. Now, the HUD
maintains its own "on/off" switch independently, although the HUD is never
displayed except on a full screen. When you go to full-screen, hud_active
determines whether the HUD is displayed, and can be toggled by pressing '='
(going "past" full screen).  hud_active remembers its status, so if you're
one who likes HUD, you can turn it on once and switch back and forth between
full-screen and the status bar, getting the HUD each time you're in full
screen; if you dislike HUD, you can turn it off and then it won't come back
just by switching to full screen. In either case, you can toggle HUD, while
in full screen mode, by using '='. If you really hate HUD, you can stick a
-1 for hud_active in the config file and it will never come up no matter
what you type.

Fixed bug in status bar which was causing armor (and perhaps health) percent
signs to not be updated during color changes (this was related to the
all-gray percent sign "bug", but the cause was different).

Fixed "bug" in V_DrawPatchTranslated which was drawing patches twice in the
case of their being red. Option to make status bar all red is still in
place, but V_DrawPatchTranslated and V_DrawPatch are both much faster now --
the all- red option is unecessary to get the same performance as before the
status bar changes were made.

Made god mode cheat work everywhere (E1M8 exit, MAP30 spawnspots, telefrags,
etc.) when compatibility mode is turned off. Previously only MAP30
spawnspots were being handled.

Wrote routine to automatically generate TRANMAP. TRANMAP is now generated as
part of game initialization, based dynamically on PLAYPAL. However, you can
always override it with your own lump. There is no need to store any data in
the .exe or load tranmap.wad anymore, since a fast algorithm exists to
compute TRANMAP at game startup, and it will adjust itself to a different
PLAYPAL.

Evaluated translucency effect. A (symmetric) 50/50 translucency filter leads
to a bad color distribution in most Doom sprites. A 66/33 filter has better
results, such as a near-perfect-looking translucent blue soul sphere (the
50/50 filter makes the soul sphere have dark spots). This may just be due to
the low color resolution.

The filter percentage used by the automatic TRANMAP setter can be set in the
config file, for minor tweaking and/or experimentation. This filter
percentage does not affect external TRANMAPs if they are loaded, since it
only affects the automatically-generated TRANMAP.

Fixed problem with health and armor percent signs not being colored the same
as the numbers -- it felt odd, having 100 health -- 100 what? <g>. Not sure
whether this was a bug, so made it optional: sts_pct_always_gray makes
percent signs not get drawn in the color of the numbers they are next to --
it makes them just get drawn gray. Similar to sts_num_always_red, but for
gray percent signs.

Enabled variable-pitched sounds (ala v1.1), turned on either by config file,
or by TNTPITCH cheat. These variable pitched sounds do not have a pwad
developer interface -- they are just random or approximate pitch bends
applied in the original code, such as making chaingun shots have random
variations (the reason I say this, is that I thought I heard someone say
that they wanted to make a wad just to use variable pitched sounds. But you
can't control the pitch yourself in the wad, not yet, anyway :) [BTW, Sample
rate, which you CAN control in wads, is a totally different beast and I'm
not talking about that here]).

Added config file option and TNTSMART cheat to toggle last week's monster IQ
improvement (remembering former enemies, including players out of sight).
All monster IQ improvements will be switched under this as well.

Made player cheats stay preserved across non-exit level changes
(i.e. idclev).  For example, god mode stays around even after idclev. So
many times when testing stuff I typed idclev.. iddqd, that I got tired of
it. However, player powers (e.g. invisibility, rad suit) are still cleared
when changing levels.

Added TNTAMO, TNTRAN cheats as aliases for TNTAMMO and TNTTRAN, since typing
them is less stressful (fewer repeated letters). I'm a mild RSI sufferer and
this makes certain cheat codes harder to type :(

2/20/98:

Changed "." to be the first iwad directory searched, instead of the exe's
dir.

Added warning comments about savegames (modifications to mobj_s structure
may cause savegame crashes unless special measures are taken in p_saveg.c).

Reenabled "green is turbo" message during demo playbacks as well as
netgames.

2/16/98 killough

Designed a much more stable random number generator process, to guard
against demo sync problems. Every basic block now has a unique random number
generator assigned to it, so that two blocks cannot interfere. There's also
a development process in place for adding new random number generator calls
without breaking demo sync, something which was not possible earlier.

One of the reasons demo sync, such as in crusher.lmp, is so sensitive to
changes, is because a single pseudorandom number generator is used. In Jim's
example last week, where he changed a crushing ceiling and it made the
player go crazy in crusher.lmp, this could have just been because the
crushing ceiling uses a RNG call, and so if Jim (unintentionally <g>)
changed it so that it called the RNG a different number of times, then when
some other code called the RNG, it got totally different numbers than before
Jim's change.

The new method makes sure that this won't happen as often, by assigning a
key (a C enum) to each P_Random() call, with at least one key per basic
block. Now the damage than can be done is limited to within each basic
block, e.g., no demo sync problems involving, say, random gunfire, can be
caused by changing the number of times the crushing ceiling code calls its
random number generator.

This desyncing due to the RNG was what was happening with the bullet-puff
fix -- the random number generator used to generate the puffs, interfered
with the same RNG being used for everything else in Doom, so we had to
preserve the lack of bullet puffs in demo_compatibility mode. I suspect the
same is true of Rand's blockmap iterator change.

In demo_compatibility mode, the old sequence must still be returned, in
order to preserve old demos working even remotely. They still suffer from
this problem, that changes in one part of Doom can affect the sync in
another part of Doom. The new localized RNG method only benefits demo sync
when compatibility mode is turned off, but if we use the new method to
prevent different blocks from desyncing each other, we should have fewer
problems in the future.

Added TNTKEY[RYB][SC] cheat codes. TNTKEY followed by R,Y,B, then by S,C,
toggles the red, yellow, blue skull and card keys. A tiny change had to be
made to the status bar widget display code, to allow keys to display
properly after being removed. IDK* cheat codes are left unchanged except
that IDK adds all 6 keys in the middle of typing IDKFA, so you can stop
typing IDKFA early to get just the keys, or type it fully to get everything.

Added TNTAMO[1-4B] ammo cheat code. TNTAMO followed by 1-4 toggles the
respective ammo (bullet, shell, cell, rocket), and TNTAMOB toggles the
backpack. TNTAMMO (two M's) felt awkward to type, so I used TNTAMO.

Added TNTWEAP[1-9] weapon cheat code. TNTWEAP1 is the same as IDBEHOLDS
(toggles berserker fist), while TNTWEAP followed by '2' through '9' toggles
the weapon's presence (you can even remove the pistol). 9 is the SSG and 8
is the chainsaw, in case you forgot :) The cheat is independent of custom
weapon key maps.

All of these cheats have interactive messages, similar to IDBEHOLD, to help
guide lost souls. :)

Added silent teleporter functions. Old silent teleporter linedef types still
work, including the switch types, but they have been changed to use a
function more like the original Doom teleporter. The linedef->linedef
teleporter which preserves almost every aspect of the player's movement,
only makes sense with walk linedef types, and its function and linedef
numbers have been renamed.

Silent teleporter now has two forms: line->line, and line->thing. Both are
silent and try to preserve as many properties as possible, but the
line->thing type of teleporter cannot preserve player position since there
is only one point of exit. However, the line->thing silent teleporter can be
used with switches.

2/15/98 killough

Removed savegame-compatibility-preserving code, since it's too hard to
maintain and fix savegame bugs at the same time. Savegames from v1.9 cannot
be loaded into Boom, and of course, Boom savegames cannot be loaded into
v1.9. Fixing this is hard because some of the actual underlying data
structures have been modified and so it's not as simple as a runtime
compatibility switch. Since Doom never supported savegames across different
versions, why should we?  Past demo version support is more important, even
if its not fully attainable.

Fixed problem with monsters going to sleep after killing other monsters,
when players are out of sight. Problem was, of course, that only one
"target" was remembered at a time by the monster. Although there is a
"lastlook" field which remembers the last player being targeted, the code
does not make the monsters go after such a player unless it is visible by
line-of-sight. This is probably because the original code tried to look for
more than one player and made monsters go after the first player seen,
rather than the original target necessarily (if one player is visible, why
not go after it instead of searching for a former enemy?). Problem was, if
no players were seen, it just went back to sleep.

Also, only up to 2 players still in the game were being searched for, in
round-robin fashion starting with the "lastlook" one, and the code used a
hard-coded "&3" instead of being based on MAXPLAYERS (only the first 4
players could ever be seen by monsters). No more than 2 players were
searched, so if, say, player 1 was the last one looked at, and player 1 and
player 2 were both still in the game but out of the monster's sight, player
3 would not be seen even if it should be, so the monster would be put to
sleep, until a short time later when it wakes up again seeing 3. This would
cause the reaction time and sound effects to vary depending on the number of
the player first seen, as compared to number of the player last looked at.

Now the code searches all active players starting with the last one looked
at. If none are visible, it goes after a former enemy, which could either be
a player or monster (it would be the last enemy the monster was attacking
before being forced to change his plans <g>). It goes after the last enemy,
regardless of whether it's visible or not, and most of the time will be a
player, two main exceptions being: 1) when a monster is ressurected by an AV
and cannot see any players, it goes after the last monster who killed it, if
a monster killed it and is still alive; 2) when a monster is being attacked
by more than one other monster, the monster remembers both of them, and
switches between them during every melee attack it receives, or when one of
them dies, unless a player is spotted during the switchover point in which
case the monster goes after the player until another melee attack by a
monster is received.

Now, if you make a Cyberdemon or Baron get into a fight with another
monster, you can't simply get out of his view, wait for him to kill the
other monster, and sneak behind his back while he's asleep, because he
remembers you and will come after you as soon as he's finished the other
monster. The same rule applies to all monsters.

All of this is demo_compatibility optioned, of course. If anyone has any
objections and feels the stronger compatibility option needs to be used,
because wads or players rely on monsters going to sleep after fighting other
monsters, I can change it, but I'd hate to have to get everything else
gained by turing off compatibility, just to get this.

Ideally a stack of enemies should be used -- whenever you need a new enemy,
pop one off the stack; whenever you need to change enemies, push any current
one on the stack. However, this is overkill, given Doom's current monster AI
-- remembering one enemy is enough, and takes much less coding than a
general enemy stack.

2/14/98 killough

Converted R_DrawColumn to assembly and tuned it. Only a small performance
increase on a PPro, but maybe better results can be found on a Pentium or
486.  AGI stalls are likely to limit the benefit which can be gained from it
on a Pentium. The inherent problem with R_DrawColumn is its serialism, since
a source pixel's offset is computed, then the source pixel is loaded, then
it is color-mapped, and finally it is written. Each of these operations must
wait for the previous to finish. To get better instruction level parallelism
requires doing two or more pixels at once, something which requires either
more CPU registers to work with, or which requires spilling registers to
memory (using mem, which is slower, to hold variables instead of registers).
There is no simple answer to this problem. A Pentium Pro / PII processor
offsets the problem by renaming registers and executing instructions out of
order (there are no AGI stalls associated with the PPro, so the serialism in
R_DrawColumn is not a problem, and so fewer registers are needed in the
source without requiring spillage).

Some have expressed concern about scripting being too slow in Phase 3, but I
don't share this concern, since I know it's the renderer, not the rest of
Boom, which is slow right now. Try using "boom -nodraw -fastdemo crusher"
and see what I mean. It gets nearly 4000 frames per second on my machine if
you turn off the drawing.

It's the entire renderer, not any one particular part of it. I've done case-
by-case analysis of each function, seeing how much speedup there would be if
a function such as R_DrawColumn, R_DrawSpan, etc. were replaced by no-ops,
and the speedup is not too great proportional-wise; only a 33% or so
increase speed is gained by disabling any single one of these functions --
tuning them perfect can therefore only get so much benefit. So the work
which is taking all the time, is pretty much spread throughout the renderer,
which is good in a way, since it means there's no single bottleneck,
although it's bad since it's harder to know what to tune next. Of course,
I'm basing all this on what I've observed; it's conceivable that on a
Pentium system all this means nothing and there's clearly a single
bottleneck function. A Pentium requires much more care in instruction
scheduling than a PPro or a 486 does. It is unique among x86 processors, in
that never before or after the Pentium, has an x86 implementation had such
dependence on instruction scheduling. The 486 and below had some cases of
stalls, such as using an index register in indexed addressing, but these
stalls were usually on the order of 1-2 clocks, when the instruction already
required 4 or more, and these stalls did not occur very often.

Thw DOS/linux version of R_DrawColumn was not used since it is not directly
usable without losing the TFE bug fix. There was a small difference in the
instruction scheduling in the DOS/linux version's inner loop, a difference
which may reduce AGI stalls and allow better pairing on the Pentium, but to
schedule the instructions in this way, requires either spilling registers
(using memory instead of registers for some variables), or writing self-
modifying code (which is what the DOS/linux code did, but which we can't do
in protected mode without a lot of trouble). It is not clear to me whether
the additional pairing opportunity can offset the register spills.

Ported R_DrawSpan routine from readme.asm, which came with the linux source.
Required changing from Intel to AT&T syntax; replacing self-modifying code;
and removing the depedence on colormaps being aligned at 256-byte addresses.
No significant performance increase compared to the C code on a PPro;
perhaps there are improvements from this change on a Pentium or a 486.

Made default.cfg file always get loaded/saved from the same directory as the
executable, so that executable and config are always a bundled pair. Does
not change IWAD search method -- the IWAD path is still searched in this
order: executable's directory, current directory, $DOOMWADDIR, $HOME. If
this is a problem (many people may have different iwad search preferences),
I might be able to add an IWADPATH variable to the config file (one more
reason to keep the config file bundled with the .exe instead of the iwad, so
that it can be used to set the iwad search method -- however, we'd be
changing when the default.cfg is loaded, which may have unforseen problems).

Added "basesavegame" variable to allow global setting of savegame directory
path. Currently set to the same directory as the iwad which is loaded, so
that savegames are iwad-specific (allows the same boom.exe to run different
iwads and have separate savegames in each).

Commented out audible HOM alarm call for now, since detection method does
not catch every instance of HOM. However, flashing red HOM indicator still
works with TNTHOM. Bright red flashing light indicates a HOM area when
TNTHOM is toggled on.

Removed "green is turbo" message from non-net turbo games. Message still
gets printed in netgames.

Fixed savegame plat original height bug -- the problem was that platforms in
stasis were not being saved at all. A typical symptom was that if a platform
was last moving up, but it was stopped by the player (put in stasis), then
saving the game would lose the target height it was moving up to. This is
why MAP13's yellow key platform in v1.9 Doom 2 did not always return to its
original height: if you walked out of the room while it was going up, saved
a game, and later reloaded it, the height it was at when you left the room
was the highest it could ever reach after that.

Fix was to do what was already being done with active ceilings in stasis --
look for active plats which match a given thinker, and save them.

Fixed savegame crashes which were caused by not properly saving "target" and
"tracer" fields of thinkers, among other pointers inside objects. Pointers
(i.e. absolute memory addresses) were being stored in the savegame instead
of ordinals (relative positions in a linked list). Doom sets some of these
to NULL to work around this bug, but we've all seen the result: monsters are
asleep, when you load the game, etc.

Added user-friendly message to tell the player when a different savegame
version is being loaded -- previously, when a savegame had the wrong
version, nothing happened. Now a message is printed.


2/8/98 killough

Added user-configurable weapon preferences: any permutation of the 9 weapons
can be specified and the first one available is used (minor exception: if
you choose the fist over the chainsaw, it only applies to berserker fist).

However, user preferences are disabled in network games, for network sync
and DM fairness reasons, and user preferences are also disabled when
demo_compatibility is turned on. Also, there may be some sync problems with
demos even under the new engine, unless the preferences are saved as part of
the demo. It's easy to add the preferences to the demo, if we can design a
demo format which works on old and new (in other words, two formats which
the new engine can distinguish between -- maybe version id's are enough).
I'll think on this and work on it next week.

Regardless of whether it's a networked game, however, unless
demo_compatiblity is turned on, all players can now choose the SSG with '9',
and all players can choose a non-berserker fist even if they have a
chainsaw, by pressing '1' after the chainsaw is selected.

The user preferences govern the order in which weapons are chosen when one
runs out of ammo, and the order in which the SSG and chainsaw are given
priority over the shotgun and fist, respectively.

Fixed problem with SSG and BFG not being switched to when another weapon
runs out and the BFG or SSG has room for exactly one shot. I think a big
deal was made about the BFG in the newsgroups. The BFG worked just fine if
you selected it yourself, but Doom would not select it to replace another
weapon running out of ammo, even if there was 40 units of cells
available. >40 versus >=40.  The SSG had a similar problem when only 2
shells were available.

There are three unresolved problems I noticed this weekend:

1. Sometimes on Doom 1 E2M3 (and perhaps other levels), light levels are at
full brightness. It happened when I used -warp 2 4 and then idclev23, but
it's random and I cannot reproduce it now. I did not use idbeholdl, but the
effect was the same. It might have just been a bug in the initial coding of
the new cheat code detector.

2. There's a "stuck note" problem of a different kind, in MAP09's music.
This occurs under DOS 6.xx, with a SBPro 2 card, and without any special
sound drivers loaded, with "Adlib" music selected (type 1). (i.e. it's a
basic non-windoze 8-bit SB system). Sound is almost perfect, but music is
not.

3. When hundreds of monster death sounds are kicked off at once, sound stops
working until player has moved around a bit. I know what causes this
problem, but I don't have a fix right now since there's no simple way I know
of to query allegro about whether a non-looped sample has finished playing
or not. If there's a way to do this, I know how to fix the "sound overload"
problem. Try using TNTEM on MAP16 and then try the door of the first room.

Fixed bug in TNTEM cheat, which was leaving behind lost souls when pain
elementals were killed by it. Problem was that the lost souls were spawned
several tics after the PE died, so the fix was to accelerate the spawning of
the lost souls to happen immediately during the TNTEM cheat, so that they
could be killed during the same cheat. Verified fix using MAP20.

Make dead player sprite limit variable, in the config file. If you set it to
a negative value, there will be no limit to the number of player corpses (it
will make you Knee Deep in the Dead <g>). A non-negative value sets the
limit to that value. The default limit is 32, just as in Doom.

Removed switch limit. There's still a static table which lists the switches,
but if it's expanded, or if later a lump is added to control switch
animations, the new code will be able to expand to any number of switches.

Changed SCREENWIDTH, SCREENHEIGHT to MAX_SCREENWIDTH, MAX_SCREENHEIGHT in
many places, to allow high-res video to be easier to implement later.

Added IDK cheat, which adds the keys. It works in the middle of IDKFA as
well, so you can type IDK and get the keys, and then if you type FA, you get
ammo as well. This allows you to add keys without ammo, without having to
remember a totally new cheat code (it's just the first part of an existing
cheat code).

Added TNTHOM cheat to toggle HOM autodetection, instead of relying on
-devparm.  HOM detector doesn't work 100% yet, but since it's just a
debugging feature anyway, I'm not going to spend much time on it until I
have more free time, or I see the solution right in front of me. Boom can't
take the place of level authors <g>.

2/7/98 killough

Added wait for vertical sync, to prevent breaks in screen during
blit. Screen is much smoother now. Although page flipping is more
attractive, it is not supported by all video cards without using planar
pixels, which would slow Doom down, since we'd need to convert from Doom 8
bpp packed pixels to planar pixels during every frame. Therefore I've
decided not to use page flipping for 320x200 mode. When higher resolutions
are also supported, this issue can be reconsidered.

In the rare case that vsync messes up your system or slows it down too much,
you can turn it off in default.cfg.

Changed PPro blit routine to copy forwards instead of backwards, to take
advantage of vertical sync fix.

Fixed problem with ExM8 endings not working correctly -- the code was okay
to start off with <g> gamemode!=commercial is necessary and sufficient. The
TNT wads set gamemode==commercial. The E2M8 ending was not working right.

Completely rewrote cheat code detector, in anticipation of people adding
more cheats. Cheats are now governed by a simple table with 2-3 entries per
cheat code: An unencrypted string of the cheat code; a function to handle it
when it's detected; and an optional argument, either a non-negative integer
to be passed to the function, or a negative integer which indicates special
things like the idclev and idmus arguments. Cheat-handling code runs faster
and is easier to read now. Note: only the last 12 characters of a cheat code
are significant now, but this allows a clever trick using shift registers to
be used to speed up the cheat detector and make the code smaller.

Removing the scrambling from the cheat codes was only one of the reasons for
the rewrite -- mainly, it was changed to make the C code more readable, and
to make adding new cheat codes easier. The complicated cheat structures that
were in Doom, and the overhead Doom had to maintain them during every event,
were replaced with a much simpler table-driven approach. A long long shift
register remembers up to 12 characters typed, and the cheat codes are
matched using the bottom bits of the shift register.

As expected, the blockmap limit is a wad limitation, not an engine
limitation per se. Fixing the 64K blockmap limit requires changing the wad
definition.  The blockmap limit is inherent, in that pwads use 2-byte
integers to express offsets in the blockmap.

There are two alternatives I can think of:

1. Add a new lump, an "extended blockmap". I would then enhance the BSP node
builder to generate it. Boom would operate the same as it does now if this
expanded blockmap is not present, otherwise, it would use the new one
instead.  I'd choose to call the new blockmap "XBLOCMAP" or something like
that.

2. On-the-fly blockmap generation. In BSP, blockmap building is the fastest
operation, and it would probably not be too slow for Boom to do it
on-the-fly as well -- it takes under a second on most levels. This would
prevent any need for an external pwad spec change, but it would mess up wads
which use blockmap special effects (know of any wads which intentionally
leave out linedefs from blocklists?), since it would be ignoring their
blockmap. It could be made contingent on the compatibility flag, but I do
not like the sound of this.

I like #1 much better, because it means people will have to use BSP :) (just
kidding -- I think #1 is better because it doesn't break compatibility!)

Did a systematic search for all static limits in Doom, by egrep'ing for:

([^r]int|unsigned|long|short|double|float|char|_t).*[[]([0-9]+|[A-Z_]+)[]]

(i.e. almost every fixed-size array declaration in Doom.)

Found and removed limit of 32 for icon landings -- so that's why my wad
crashed!!! I was trying a special effect almost a year ago that did not work
when I had too many landings. The limit used to be 32, and no checks were
made by Doom to see whether it had been exceeded (it might therefore have
caused mysterious crashes), but now the icon landings are unlimited.

Added DPMI lock to sound samples, to prevent swapping out of the sound
sample memory by virtual memory system.

2/01/98 killough

Corrected Ultimate Doom detection -- you no longer have to use doomu.wad.
doom.wad will be treated as registered or retail (ultimate) based on E4Mx
lump presence.

Fixed music looping problem -- the music is looping when it shouldn't in
some cases -- this means that if you want to turn looping on, you need to do
it somewhere else instead of S_StartMusic. It looks like that code was right
to begin with, since many things started looping (such as the Bunny scroller
music in Doom 1/UD) which don't loop in the original Doom.

Added version.c and version.h, to automatically record compilation date
without intervention. Right now all it does is print the date at startup,
although we can do other stuff with it. The important thing is to keep all
version-related info in version.* If you have more ideas please contact me.

Added HOM autodetection, which beeps and displays a message in -devparm
mode.  Normal mode is unaffected, since this would probably annoy regular
users of wads. Perhaps other non-fatal error messages should be switched
with -devparm too, to avoid confusing wad players who don't understand
technical issues.

It's also possible to fill in the areas left by the HOM, say with a bright
red color, so that the HOM effect is replaced with a solid color, but this
is not done right now.

The check for HOM is trivial and there is no negative performance impact.

More performance tuning, by replacing some macros with inlined functions --
apparently djgpp's codegen generates better code when functions are inlined
than when the same code is inlined using macros -- perhaps some additional
optimization phases are run when functions are inlined (not uncommon -- HP's
compilers do this). Also manually unrolled some loops in critical drawing
routines.

Fixed opening bug -- too little space was being allocated for openings,
causing seg faults. Changed z_zone.c, so that when compiled debug, it
records where each block is allocated. With this change, z_zone.c
immediately found the bug of not allocating enough space for openings --
source, line, and file. If you ever have problems (memory, crashes), build
debug since it gives you more info (it is much slower though, since it now
checks the zone heap for consistency during every allocation).

Enabled -nodraw and -noblit options for -fastdemo (previously only -timedemo
allowed them).

1/31/98 killough

Improved sector tag search time by hashing sector tags. Algorithm reduces
the average number of sectors searched for matching tags, to usually less
than 2 per search. Old average was > 30 for original Doom levels, bigger for
larger wads like Eternal. No significant speedup for original Doom-sized
levels was detectable by me, though, probably because the original levels
have so few sectors that merely searching them from front-to-back is
probably just as fast.  But for large wads with > 100 sectors I expect a
significant speedup.

Minor performance enhancement gained by clipping a front BSP node's bounding
box against the current view. Previously only the back BSP nodes were
checked.

Made some changes to the lump hashing algorithm again, this time, mainly to
improve program robustness, decrease memory overhead, and speed up hash
table initialization. Gameplay speed was not significantly changed, since
the hash table is already at its peak efficiency. Somewhere else in Boom has
to be attacked now as being the major bottleneck -- it looks like the
renderer, since turning off rendering lets Boom get over 3400 fps now on my
machine!!!  "I know, I'll get it up for you somehow. So far we're using all
we can, just to keep up with them." -- Geordi LaForge

Some minor code shuffling/rearrangement to improve self-documentation and/or
allow compiler inlining.

Commented out "reload" hack, a feature which was the whole reason behind
-wart.  It has no use for us now (it was an id development option), and
anyway, it does not work with the new hashing algorithms unless they are
changed some more (reloading a level might invalidate some lump entries and
the hash table would need to be recomputed). The reload hack was explicitly
called a hack in the original sources, and uses ~ (tilde) characters in
front of internal wad filenames to indicate it's in effect. It's used in
conjunction with -wart, which expects id's own set of development
subdirectories and wad files corresponding to each map under
development. (-wart still works, by the way, but it only does the same as
-warp now -- something most of us probably thought it only did all along,
since we did not have id's development subdirectories on our hard drive!!!)

Added silent teleporter effect. Right now it's just linedef type 203 and it
is a walk repeated linedef type like 97. I'll let Jim do the linedef type
numbering assignments, as well as add the W1, S1, and SR varieties. It's
better for one person to coordinate linedef assignments, than for everyone
to simply pick the "smallest type not currently used in checked-out file".
Even though Jim will tell me there are many linedef types available <g>, I
want him to do the assignments.

The silent teleporter works well, even when the player is falling in
mid-air.  The player's height above floor is preserved during teleport, as
are the player's momentum and angle. The teleporter is constructed with two
linedefs of type 203 having the same sector tag. Walking into one walks out
the other, and the player's position along the linedef is preserved during
teleport by interpolation.

Rotation is also possible, as the player's momentum and angle are adjusted
according to the difference in the linedefs. If the angle and/or momentum
were set 180 degrees backwards, the player would get stuck in the
teleporter, as long as they were moving. By setting up a series of silent
teleporters back-to-back, it's possible to make a player's own momentum
carry them several places in a short period, even in mid-air.

Fixed demo sync problems -- the change to stop using the first blockmap
entry caused all demos which were working before, to stop working. As long
as demo compatibility can be preserved as much as possible, I think it's the
correct goal, but please do not confuse means or goals with ends. If a demo
sync problem is easily preventable, it should be prevented. The blockmap
change is now qualified with "compatibility", though I'd be willing to use
the weaker "demo_compatibility" later if we're sure it's not going to change
gameplay (it caused crusher.lmp to look totally different than before, as
though certain collisions were being missed -- so perhaps the 0 entry has a
purpose).

Looked at other changes made this week and noticed that in some cases,
"compatibility" was being used even though I think it should have been
"demo_compatibility", such as in bug fixes which don't affect gameplay much
(such as bugs which haven't been turned into effects). I'm talking about
things like the lost soul bug -- apart from making you curious about hearing
a noise behind a wall, did the lost soul bug change gameplay much? Did you
turn it into an effect in one of your levels? I doubt it. So I think the fix
for it should be turned on unless demo_compatibility is true.

BTW, the floor height and 2s line bug fixes which Jim qualified with
"compatibility," are still under "compatibility" since many wads used those
bugs as features.

demo_compatibility is true iff compatibility is true and a demo is being
played back or recorded. demo_compatibility is false if you are playing the
game interactively, even if compatibility mode is turned on. By using
demo_compatibility instead of compatibility for bug fixes, TNTCOMP needs to
be used less often.

demo_compatibility is the switch used to turn on the bullet puff and rocket-
absorbing wall bugs, for example. The bullet buff can affect monster
behavior, so its absorbtion by walls is critical for demos, but the
difference is so subtle that it only affects demos significantly -- is your
gameplay going to be adversely affected by seeing bullet puffs where you
didn't before? The same might be true of the blockmap linedef 0 fix, if it's
indeed a fix.

If in doubt, use "compatibility" and consult with me; if it does not break
demos such as crusher.lmp, demo1, demo2, demo3, and does not change gameplay
much except that it fixes a bug or does the "right" thing, then you can turn
it on all the time. If it breaks demos which are otherwise currently working
(I'm not implying all v1.9 demos must work), but it does not change gameplay
-- something like the bullet puff fix, or the level ending text's print
speed, or the arithmetic method used to answer point/line queries -- then
use "demo_compatibility". If it can affect gameplay significantly, and
without user intervention (pwads taking advantage of the new engine), then
use "compatibility".

New linedef types, for instance, should go under "demo_compatibility" since
it takes either user intervention, or a previously bad wad, to make the new
linedef types have any effect. Even whether "demo_compatibility" is required
for new linedef types, is questionable to me -- did bad linedef types appear
often in wads, and do we want to preserve them being no-ops in compatibility
mode?  If we feel the need to have the new linedef types optionally
suppressed, then I suggest a new switch, separate and apart from
compatibility, to suppress the new linedef types. The new linedef types are
almost orthogonal to the gameplay compatibility issue.

Added mouse sensitivity menu bars, by adding support for "predefined lumps".
Now in info.c, you can define lumps which you want to be defined at load
time, and whose data is in the exe. These lumps can, of course be modified
by iwads and pwads, but they provide data in case the iwads or pwads don't
supply any.  The two mouse sensitivity menu bar lumps were a tiny amount of
data, so they were converted to C code and the predefined lump idea was
generalized to support them.

Did some minor cosmetic work on some sources, such as getting rid of some
tab characters, replacing them with their equivalents in spaces, in
accordance with the original author's comments. Re-baselining the sources is
probably not acceptable to some people right now because of disk space
reasons, but the next time it comes up, I think tab characters and trailing
whitespace at the end of lines needs to be treated too -- i.e. tab
characters, which usually stop at multiples of 8, but for which some people
have set to other sizes, should be replaced with spaces prior to checkin
unless we agree on a uniform tab stop size, which for some is not
adjustable; and, lines with blanks at the end but before newlines, should be
stripped of trailing blanks so that there are no other blanks before a
newline.

Split compatibility variable into compatibility and
default_compatibility. Now TNTCOMP only affects compatibility, not
default_compatibility -- i.e. using the TNTCOMP cheat does not affect the
default loaded at startup.

1/26/98 killough

Figured out that problem with random pink tutti-frutti was unique to PPro-
specific blit routine. Since FP numbers are 80 bits on x86 machines, storing
64-bit FP values may involve loss of precision or overflow. Even though
these 64-bit FP values were only being used to load and store data, there
was an implied conversion taking place which sometimes, though rarely,
caused pink debris to show up on the walls.

Fixed this "pink bug" by rewriting PPro blit routine in assembly instead of
C, and by using 64-bit integer loads/stores instead of 64-bit FP
loads/stores (it still uses the FPU though, and using it this way is not
possible in C with djgpp right now). Also tuned the new routine and got it
up from 510 to 525 fps.

1/25/98 killough

Found much simpler solution to the Medusa bug -- the Medusa bug can be fixed
if multipatched columns are constructed with the proper column headers and
footers. Previously, only the raw image data was constructed for each
column, and Doom assumed all masked columns (2s middle textures and sprites)
came from a source that contained the normal column headers, runs of posts,
etc.

However, this fix still does not allow multipatched columns with transparent
posts. That would require changing the code which draws mulitple patches in
memory to form a texture, to be much more general, and to be able to
generate an arbitrary series of posts as output.

Also removed arbitrary 64K limit on composite texture size -- a limit which
I suppose was there originally because of a 64K limit to segments in real
mode.  This was apparently a throwback to Wolf3d.

Tuned R_DrawSpan() by using the unrolled code that was present in the linux
port but commented out. Verified another 10-20 fps speed increase with
-fastdemo.

Looked at djgpp's memcpy() implementation and determined that it was optimal
for Pentiums and earlier, because it uses REP MOVSD when possible. For PPros
and IIs it's faster to use a simple loop than to use REP MOVSD, but for the
important cases such as the screen blit, we already make a decision based on
the processor detected.

Looked at current vissprite sorting implementation and determined that the
impact was negligible on "normal" wads -- only when hordes of monsters
appear, or any other situation where many sprites are visible, does the
sorting make any significant difference in fps. For 0-30 visible sprites
it's negligible.

Tuned lump hash function by choosing a different multiplier for one of the
characters in the name. Verified ~ 1 fps increase in speed.

Attempted to tune texture cache loads (the place where Doom pauses in the
middle of the dotted progress indicator), but determined that bottleneck was
totally disk-IO-bound. Attempted to change the order in which textures or
their patches are cached, to reduce hard drive seeks (elevator problem), but
without having more details on the mapping from file position to drive
cylinder, the benefit of trying to reduce seeks by reading the file's
patches in the order they appear in the wad, was insignificant.

Improved sprite initialization routine to search and find sprites more
quickly, by hashing them. New algorithm probes less than 5% as many sprite
lumps, looking for matches, as the old algorithm did, based on doom2.wad.

Rewrote sprite/flat lump merging routine to use faster and simpler
algorithm.

Added support for tab stops in dprintf(), and increased maximum buffer size
to allow a full screen of text, in the heads up display library. Improved
z_zone memory allocator statistics to use new tab support and print stats in
real-time.

Fixed bugs in zone memory allocator causing fragmentation and/or memory
loss.  Improved support of virtual memory when physical memory goes
away. Tested it using Covers on a "7 MB virtual machine". Tuned parameters
to reduce fragmentation and improve memory usage, while maintaining
performance.  Corrected some minor miscalculations of real-time statistics
for debug mode.

1/22/98 killough

Fixed SSG reload sound effect and pwad sound effects, by properly
considering the sampling frequency stored in the lump when constructing
allegro samples.

Improved worst-case performance of lump hash table, by using coalesced
chaining instead of linear probing. Verified average probes/search to be
under 2 during practically all Doom playing, by watching hash statistics in
real time.

1/19/98 killough

Looked at hash table performance some more, and improved it by adding
redundancy to the table size to prevent "buildup". Now -fastdemo crusher
gets 500 fps on my system!!!  Doom was spending too much damn time doing
linear searches. :) This version is definitely faster now than Doom 2
v1.9. But I will not stop until it's perfect :)

Fixed Medusa bug -- sorta. It's going to take a lot of work probably to ever
get support for transparent 2s normal textures with multiple patches, simply
because of how Doom separates rendering sprites and 2s normals, with
everything else. It would probably be easiest in that case to just write a
front-end in Doom which takes the patches and creates the composites, not
how Doom creates composites, but in the same form as the original
patches. That's the simplest way to go -- write a function which, perhaps
when loading the sprite or texture, recognizes multiple patches and merges
them into a single patch at runtime, so that the renderer does not have to
deal with multiple patches.

However, as a compromise, I thought it might be easy to just detect if the
2s normal was multipatched, and if so, draw it as a non-transparent region
(i.e.  no transparent 'posts' which can be seen through). After around 2
hours of experimenting, and working around HOM, floor slime lines, and other
problems, I finally got it working. MEDUSA.WAD is included as a
demonstration. The only thing left to do with it is to fix any bugs found in
it.

As for making multi-patched SEE-THROUGH 2s normals -- that's probably too
hard without major changes (but maybe not after a few more months of
studying the renderer) -- it would like supporting sprites with
multi-patched frames.  That's another whole project. At least for now, you
will be able to display non-transparent multipatched textures in 2s normals,
although they will have HOM if they have see-through regions. The casual
interchanging of the words "transparent" and "singly-patched", or
"non-transparent" and "multi-patched", in Doom editing circles, is not
arbitrary, you see. <g>

Note: it took adding around 50 lines of code to the renderer, to fix Medusa.
That's big, considering most bug fixes in the renderer have been one-liners.

Added support for multi-line messages, mainly for use in conjunction with
dprintf(). Newlines now are handled properly. Need to make sure this doesn't
interfere with anything else, but I don't expect so, since the affected
"heads-up" routine never supported multiple lines, and unless it sees a
newline character, it works the same as it did before.

Commented out some some printf()s in v_video.c which showed up as noise on
the screen while drawing patches out of range. Text is nearly unreadable
while Doom is playing and flickers. If the error message was fatal enough,
then I_Error() should have been used. There may be other cases where printfs
are giving diagnostic messages, which flicker on a 320x200 screen.

Some minor comment changes (my previous comments) and code shuffling --
nothing of consequence.

1/18/98

Figured out why some demos were getting out of sync -- the bullet puff fix
affects demos, and must not be used while demo_compatibility is turned on.
-playdemo demo1 and -playdemo demo2 work again now. However, demos are still
not 100% in sync with v1.9, nor will they probably ever be -- take a look at
DEMO1 for an example. If you play DEMO1 with -playdemo it works okay, but if
you wait for the internal demo, it gets out of sync and the imp on the ledge
that the player turns around to shoot, disappears suddenly right before the
player shoots -- very strange effect!!! Only happens in the internal
(deferred) playback, not -playdemo demo1, so I suspect it's similar to the
revenant bug, for which I have a possible fix (not ready net) commented out
in g_game.c (it does not fix DEMO1, and it's too risky to turn it on right
now).

The demo recording method, based on player movements, is elegant, but has
sync problems as its major drawback. Doom is highly incremental, so the
slightest error magnifies itself with time -- there is nothing built-in to
self-correct errors of this sort, be it rounding errors in wall calculations
leading to a player bouncing slightly differently off of a wall, or the
distance calculations leading to a collision or miss.

The only way these demo sync problems can be fixed, and I think the only way
VCR demos will work too, is to store information frame-by-frame, like all of
the object's positions and status. This takes a lot of memory, probably too
much. Doom is incremental, everything being expressed in terms of
deltas/tics (similar to /\x / /\ t). Also, backwards play is probably
impossible because there is no "unique inverse" of Doom. Only by recording
it fully and then playing back samples of frames can you approximate the
inverse -- you can't start at the end and go back. For that kind of
simulation, play with my toy billiard ball program which is reversible, up
to a point.

Added dprintf() function to make it simpler to print messages to the screen.
It works just like printf(), sprintf(), fprintf(), etc., except that it
prints Doom messages on the player 1 console. Mainly used for debugging,
such as printing memory usage statistics in real-time.

Changed default gamma correction to 3 (only affects people with a missing
default.cfg -- I hope there are no objections -- it's just I hate having to
turn up gamma correction everytime I start with a fresh default.cfg).

Used DSRADIO sound effect to acknowledge screenshots (Ty's idea).

Performed Rand's changes on the sources (changing the CVS logs).

Fixed makefile, adding "debug" and "release" targets, and adding correct
source file dependencies. Now if you change a header 'make' will rebuild
Doom correctly. Separate directories OBJ and OBJDEBUG are used now instead
of DOS, so that you can separately build debug and release targets without
one of them erasing the other. Suppressed warning about deleting all files
during clean.

Ran tests on the new engine with many special effects wads, such as Jens'
collection (SPECIAL2.ZIP or whatever). Did not notice any new regressions.
Also ran tests using Eternal 3, and some of my wads.

Commented out my sparkles fix for now, since it causes a new kind of rarer
sparkles, which is more noticable when it happens (usually only visible when
player is running, and occurs at the bottom of textures and sprites). Will
get back to it later.

Discovered new bug in DOOM 2 -- or in the nodes in MAP30 -- I can't believe
I never saw this before -- there's a big slime trail on the wall to the left
of the Boss' brain and it looks like the problem extends directly back to
the skull switch on the other side of the map.  At first I thought this was
a new bug in Boom, but it seems not, since I can reproduce it with Doom 2
v1.9. I hope my iwad isn't corrupted. Has everyone else seen this slime
trail but me, on the boss brain wall of MAP30? It makes a vertical line go
all the way up the wall and it can be seen solidly even if you're in
no-clipping mode and walk in-between the walls.

Fixed funny-looking slashes in paths printed out during loading (Ty's
suggestion). However, if you type -file \waddir\thiswad.wad you will still
get the backslashes printed, though it's much more consistent now (it either
reprints what you've typed in, or uses /'s). Fixing it everywhere would take
more work.

Renamed I_Add_Default_Extension to AddDefaultExtension and moved it from
i_system.c to w_wad.c (it did not seem right having it in i_system.c).

Added empty stub functions for performing saves and restores of plat height
info in savegames. I will finish the functions later, when I have more time.

Added random number generator info to the savegame, and started a very
simple extension protocol for savegames which allows new engine to accept
old or new savegames automatically. (See the source for more details -- I
think this will work to support both old and new savegames, although you
have to think hard about forward compatibility [whether any decisions we
make now prevent us from doing something in the future, etc.]).

Changed random number generator algorithm to use longer-period LCG
generator, instead of simply a mod lookup table, although the old method is
still used if compatibility mode is selected and a demo is played
back. Tested random number generator by literally listening to it with the
sound code -- it sounds white enough. <g> The old RNG sounded like bells and
whistles -- hardly random. <g>

Finished the dstrings.c changes, going so far as to make the list variable
in size (you can now add messages or remove messages and Doom will adjust
automatically to your changes -- with this change it would even have
adjusted to the missing comma bug, and displayed the concatenated messages
correctly).

Replaced main lump searching routine with hash table scheme, just like I did
on the R_TexNumForName() routine a couple of weeks ago. Immediately got
10-15 fps improvement from this change alone -- now I get 309 fps on PPro
200, MGA graphics card, with -fastdemo crusher. With -timedemo crusher I get
101 fps.

There are so many places in Doom where linear searching or other slow
algorithms were used:

1. Visplanes (one rumor I once heard was that the limit was imposed BECAUSE
of the slow search -- but this is not a valid excuse, since hash tables
exist :) Right now the algorithm enjoys an average of just under 1 visplane
comparison per lookup, instead of n comparisons per lookup in the old
algorithm if there were n visplanes.

2. Texture and lump name table lookup, when looking up a lump or tetxure by
name -- this is where a lot of Doom v1.9's time is spent while preloading
between huge levels like Eternal -- it's spending most of its time just
searching for the names. But now this has been fixed, and no matter how many
lumps or textures there are, the search is still O(1) average-case since it
uses a linear probing hash table, with n slots preallocated for n known
items.

3. O(n^2) sorting algorithm in R_SortVisSprites -- the main reason why Doom
slowed to a crawl sometimes on levels with many monsters in view, and
probably why there was a limit imposed on the number of visible
sprites. Let's just be glad they didn't use a bubble sort :)

4. Scroll effect linedef updates -- old algorithm updated every sidedef
which was animated, once per frame, so if there were 1000 animated linedefs,
that would be 1000x as much work per frame. New algorithm uses global
counter which is all that needs updating each frame, and then the sidedefs
are drawn with the appropriate offsets, which are only computed when the
sidedefs are visible.  O(n) setup cost, O(1) overhead per frame, O(1)
overhead per visible sidedef, compared to old method's O(n) setup cost, O(n)
overhead per frame.

5. Others?

1/17/98

Refined PPro/PII blit routine optimization: when PII or PPro CPU is
detected, some optimized inlined C code is used instead of memcpy, giving
another 10-15% performance boost on those CPUs. Wrote a separate routine so
it's more readable and reusable now.

Completely redesigned and rewrote memory wrappers and lump caching system.
Threw away dalloc.c as being too incongruous with z_zone.c, which is
essential.  This means every file had to be changed which #included
"dalloc.h". New memory manager seems to work much better. <g> Verified
memory behavior by printing statistics such as the percentage of
fragmentation, in real-time. Tuned many parameters for maximum performance
without significant fragmentation, such as the chunk size.

The problems with memory seen earlier seem to have been aggrevated by
fragmentation. The Doom lumps tend to be very large, but very varied, in
size, and many classical methods, such as the one probably used in gcc's
libc (probably the 'buddy system'), are not prepared to deal with Doom's
widely varying sizes. Therefore the previous enhancements I did, while good
in theory, did not work well because they were built on top of libc
malloc(), free() etc. and the libc free() routine in gcc does not to
coalesce blocks often when they are freed, causing fragmentation, and making
a wad like Covers seem like it needs 100 MB to run (no, really).

So I'm afraid our own memory pool is needed -- we have to write our own
low-level malloc, not just a wrapper (well, we can call malloc() once to
allocate the pool -- we don't need to get involved with sbrk()).

All files were changed to use z_zone. You MUST #include "z_zone.h" if you
use malloc, free, etc. in any future code, unless it's totally
self-contained w.r.t. heap allocation, such as a library which only uses it
internally (if you set globals that other files read, or you return
malloc'ed space, etc., you need to use the wrappers defined in
z_zone.h). Contact me for more details.  Usually you just need to put
#include "z_zone.h" at the top of your code, and the rest is automatic.

Changed mmus2mid.c to follow indentation and comment style more in line with
the rest of the code, and added 'static' to internal functions and
variables, to prevent namespace pollution and to allow total
inlining. Commented out some unused functions to reduce executable's size
and/or prevent warnings.

Added music volume support, although it's weak. <g> On my system right now,
Allegro seems to make the volume of sounds and music much softer than usual,
and no allegro commands I've tried, such as set_volume, fix it, and both my
sound card's analog amplifier and built-in mixer are set to maximum volume.
Allegro just deafens the sound. But let's not forget, Allegro is tradeware.

Fixed music problem on SBPro -- not sure why it doesn't work on SBPro yet
unless ADLIB is selected -- the same thing happens if the "digital sfx" midi
is used, perhaps because required samples are missing. We should probably
force ADLIB if it's available, which is what happens now (see i_sound.c).

Still, however, the music quality is poor -- there's no "bass" to it. <g>
Some of the notes are slightly off (it sounds like it's an octave or half
too high), and the instruments are poor. It's not my sound card or driver
which is intrinsically the problem -- music can be played back quite well
with many MUS and MID players and Doom v1.9's music player, all on my
system.  It's just the current allegro & mmus2mid setup is not quite right
yet.  Others can tackle this.

I had to decrease the tempo slightly, because all songs were going by just a
little too fast. I don't know the exact figure which should be used.

Added R_DoorClosed function for my earlier automap closed door bug --
previously the expression used in my fix for the automap rendering bug was
in two places, but since it's a big expression, I decided a separate
function was appropriate. Also removed the exceptional case of two sky
floors, since it was not really correct (only two sky ceilings cause uppers
to be ignored -- there's no analogy with lowers for sky floors, as my logic
previously was using).

1/16/98

Integrated Jim's changes to the automap and music.

Added missing sentinel at the end of sprite list in info.c, as per Jim's
suggestion.

Tuned the visplane hash function for better performance (simplified the
arithmetic needed to compute the hash function, as well as chose a hash
function which leads to very few visplane comparisons on several real wads).

1/15/98

Fixed missing commas in dstrings.c found by Steve McCrea.

Fixed memory thrashing by changing z_zone's purge_replacement() algorithm.

1/11/98 -- killough

Slightly improved keyboard routine, by adding allegro_init() to d_main.c and
by slightly tuning keyboard routine's inner loop.

Increased default of numChannels to try to avoid confusion over sounds.
Three channels is not enough, because "3 channels" means only 3 sounds are
allowed. This was why some people experienced doors not working in my last
version -- their numChannels parameter was too low. The reason it did not
have this problem in the DOSDoom port is that it did not correctly implement
sound-stopping (which is why rockets and chainsaws sounded funny), and so
Doom's own code which stops sounds automatically based on priority, and
limited by the numChannels parameter, was not stopping them. My fix last
time made the numChannels parameter suddenly become important.

Fixed automap bug (closed doors can be seen through) -- the bug was that
Doom did not consider a 2s linedef totally blocked (essentially 1s), if the
ceiling touched the floor on either side of the line. It DID consider the
line blocked if the ceiling on one side touched the floor on the OTHER side,
but not the SAME side, which explains why dropoffs on the other side of a
closed secret door made it consider the linedef as unblocked. Now the
automap does not show you the lines until you open the door, and the
renderer does less work anyway (previously it would draw what's behind the
door and then what's in front of it -- now it only draws the door and what's
in front of it).

There's another place in the renderer (in the flats drawing area) which has
this same bug (incorrect determination of whether openings exist), but
changing it may make some special effects like deep water and bridges not
work anymore. Paul Schmitz's comment about "fake 3d bridges" being able to
get away with not bleeding their floor textures on ONE side, may have to do
with this anomaly in the way openings are considered, because a new floor
will be drawn if it considers the opening closed, but since we know already
how to fool it by making dropoffs, we may be able to have a "closed" area
(like a closed door) that does not have the floor redrawn in front of it.
Since all that will be gained by changing this one too, is less rendering
work (since it considers it blocked more often) or a more consistent way of
considering openings, I'm not going to change it now, since the risk is too
great it will mess up subtle special effects like bridges.

I discovered that my original fix for automap bug made Doom start visibly
drawing some sprites which were behind closed doors. The reason is that the
automap fix creates a clipped post, and Doom somehow takes this as meaning
that a sprite cannot possibly be blocked by it. Fixed it by changing the way
that sprite clip ranges are set up, by creating sprite clip ranges when back
sectors are closed doors. Now automap and sprites seem to work right behind
closed doors, but thorough testing is required.

In order to support sky effects and transparent doors and lifts, special-
case code had to be added to automatically recognize these cases, and to not
execute the new automap-correcting code when the linedef was part of a
transparent door or lift, or joined two sky sectors. In these cases the old
behavior still rules.

4. Fixed span limit problem -- this was apparently the bug which was
affecting Lisa's wad, and it has probably been in every version of Doom.

When scan lines (rows) are drawn, there are spans along the x-axis which are
simply intervals (x1,x2) which have been drawn already. When Doom draws a
texture, it clips it against previously established spans, and if the
texture is non-transparent, adds it to the list by computing the union of
the previous set of intervals and the interval of the new texture. (For more
on this rendering method, see the paper "front-to-back display of BSP trees"
on my page: http://classicgaming.com/doom/scholar/.)

The bug was that Doom only allocated 32 elements in an array for the spans.
On a complicated wad like Lisa's, where a large outdoor scene has many
"posts" which consist of alternating transparent and non-transparent regions
(like the pilliars in her wad), the limit can add up. Doom never kept track
of the limit or whether it was even exceeded, so if it was exceeded, it
simply overwrote memory and the result was usually a venentian blinds crash,
or a seg fault in this version.

I tried a linked-list approach, but Doom performance dropped 20%. This is
understandable, since linked-lists have more overhead than arrays and they
also do not have as much spatial locality, so cache performance
suffers. This is an example where dynamic linked lists are worse than arrays
for performance, with one module decreasing Doom's performance by 20%
overall if linked lists are used inside it instead of arrays.

Since the number of posts is limited to approximately half of the screen
width (imagine nothing but alternating one-pixel strips), I decided to
simply increase the static limit to the theoretical maximum instead of
adding the overhead of linked lists. Only if the screen width goes up does
the static limit now go up -- it is now expressed in terms of the
SCREENWIDTH global macro.  If the static limit should ever be replaced with
a dynamic one, it should use array-doubling instead of linked data
structures, since the overhead of linked lists in that one module, decreases
overall Doom performance by 20% which means it is a critical module (I need
to look at it some more and possibly tune it). I am talking about r_bsp.c.

Removed static limits on animated flats, deathmatch starts, and intercepts
(walk linedef activations). The only static limits left that I know of, and
which can be exceeded by a pwad, are the number of crushing ceilings, and
the number of switches, activated or animated. They are the hardest static
limits to remove, based on how they are implemented right now. All other
limits, are limits which are bounded by other, more basic limits, such as
the screen resolution or the OS's limit on command-line
arguments. Increasing or eliminating these limits is not very useful right
now.

Added const to some function parameters, and made some variables and
functions static. Besides aiding documentation, and catching programmer
mistakes, const, when applied to pointer parameters of functions, prevents
"address exposure" and aids global optimization. By knowing that a function
parameter is a pointer to a const, the compiler knows that any address
passed via that datapath cannot be modified during the call, which allows
more optimization.

Fixed the level 8/9 special handling, at the suggestion of Stan Gula.

Reduced the sparkles bug problem (bottom parts of middle textures have
transparent sparkles which appear randomly when the player moves -- this was
used as a hint for a secret in Monster Mansion -- if anyone objects to my
removing the sparkles bug, which is a rounding error bug, I can make it
dependent on the compatibility flag, but I don't seriously think anyone
minds). I've tested several levels, but if anyone notices strange effects at
the top or bottom of middle textures or sprites as a result of this change,
please let me know. I have not been able yet to fix the sparkles problem
completely, without there being negative side effects, so right now, the fix
is very conservative -- it only reduces the effect in half or so. When I
tried to make the fix which corrected the problem totally, I got a new kind
of dark sparkles, but it was only noticable only on 2s middle textures which
were in "mid-air", such as "true 3d" bridges.

Fixed the scrolling wall multiple-reference special effect, by adding a
scrolling effect amount in the basic sidedef structure. Now this amount is
multiplied by the global counter and added as the offset. Right now the
amount is equal to the number of type 48 linedefs which reference the
sidedef on their right sides.

Changed sky texture renderer to allow sky textures higher than 128.
However, all columns in Doom are still limited to being 254 units high.

Fixed problem with playing back demo1, demo2, demo3 (fatal exit for missing
file was relaxed). Now only missing pwads cause immediate exit.

Turned on demo_compatibility during recordings as well as playback, if
compatibility mode turned on.

Added memory-allocation wrappers to detect out-of-memory condition when
NOWRAPPERS is defined and the smart memory allocation wrappers are
disabled. NULL return values for malloc(), realloc(), calloc(), and strdup()
are detected and handled through Doom I_Error handler.

Tuned gcc optimization flags for maximum Doom fps performance.  Currently
getting around 272 frames/second on a PPro 200, Matrox Millenium card.

1/10/98 -- killough

Fixed memory hogging problem without performance loss, by writing an
intelligent Z_Zone memory manager. Now a "working set" is established and
maintained by the memory manager. Initially a working set of 1.5 MB is
allowed for Z_Zone memory allocation (but allocated on demand). When this
limit is exceeded, purgable blocks are purged according to a priority queue
sorted on their frequency of allocation. If purging would cause thrashing,
which is what happens during Medusa (it's apparently a memory allocation
bug, although I don't have the exact cause yet), then the working set is
increased.

Watched working set statistics while playing regular Doom 2 levels and
Eternal 3 MAP31. Regular Doom levels take around 2.0 MB, while Mansion takes
around a 5.5 MB working set. No fixed pool is allocated for Zone
memory. Previously, a 6 MB pool was preallocated in the Linux port. In my
previous change, no pool was allocated but nothing was freed either until
all memory was gone. This latest version attempts to allocate as little
memory as possible and still not have to reload buffers from disk.  If it
notices that a block is being allocated and freed repeatedly, it will stop
freeing it and might increase the working set to a higher value.  This is
similar to how real operating systems manage memory through paging.

01/05/98 -- killough

Added compatibility option to config file. Now you can set a user preference
in the cfg file for whether you want compatibility mode, although I support
changing this in a wad in the future (a config lump perhaps?). The command-
line should have the last word, though. Note: compatibility mode does not
necessarily imply demo sync, although when you are in compatibility mode and
play back a demo, extra measures are taken to make sure it's "really"
compatible -- these extra steps are not user-visible nor are they humanly
perceptible in gameplay except when watching demos. See below for more.

Fixed config file loads/saves. Now you can use old DOS Doom cfg files and
they will work, except that you will need to re-adjust mouse sensitivity
most probably. It will load and save after one adjustment, though. The new
mouse sensitivity allows much more sensitivity in Doom's menu option, and
although I could never reproduce the "crash" Jim reported, I don't think it
will happen much anymore. The new range for the mouse sensitivities is 0-23
-- I don't know how that translates into the old numbers but if you divide
the old number by 4 you should get a good approximation.

Looked at DOSDoom3's keyboard handling, looked at Allegro docs, and
implemented my own keyboard handler similar (but better <g>). DOSDoom's old
keyboard handler was a hack and was part of the reason behind default.chi
and so many of the dpmi/go32 function calls. Now the only non-allegro
low-level hardware calls are the graphics ones.

Implemented separate mouse sensitivities (horizontal and vertical). New menu
option has both horizontal and vertical, but I need a graphic artist or
someone willing to write an entire Doom font generator, to put the words on
it. Right now it just says "mouse sensitivity" 3 times: the header,
horizontal, and vertical. You can still use it, though.  Current engine
design prevented me from easily adding "horizontal" and "vertical" menu
bars, since they are graphic lumps in wads.

Changed i_system.c to use allegro timer interrupt setup routines, for better
Doom realtime clock resolution.

Fixed a bug found recently in DOSDoom (yet another insufficient malloc size
bug in the routine which identifies Doom versions).

01/04/98 -- killough

Added -deh switch to turn on enhancements (thus turning off compatibility
mode). It's trivial to change the name to whatever we want, but I think it
should be made a configuration file option as well. We probably need a
-nodeh switch also, since I think the command-line should always be allowed
to override. The order should be: command-line, wad file, config file.

In non-compatibility mode, monsters on MAP30 can no longer telefrag the
player.

Change IDK[F]A cheats to give backpack as well as full ammo (not for
cheating's sake <g> but for testing and benchmarking Doom with hundreds of
Things coming at you all at once!!!) Thought about making the ammo unlimited
but didn't have the time to make the status bar changes (numbers would look
funny unless I did that). I can live with typing idfa every once and a
while, just half as often now.

Added memory allocation wrappers which were written for Jim Flynn's Patcher.
Immediately caught and fixed one bad free() which I introduced last time,
but which does not seem to be the cause of the problem in Lisa's wad, or any
other major problem. To avoid using the wrappers, which have a minor
performance hit, compile Doom with -DNOWRAPPERS, as shown in the makefile.

Fixed compiler warning messages about possibly uninitialized variables,
usually just by adding default cases to switches.

Improved -timedemo flag -- now it displays the FPS, and it also works even
on multilevel demos (previously it would give wrong timings if there were
multiple levels in the demo).

Tried MAP30 with -fastdemo in god mode (interrupt a fastdemo and start a new
game, just like -timedemo, to see it) -- instead of once every 4 seconds,
the icon throws a cube around three times a second or more (more than 10x
speedup).  Left Doom running this way while I was sleeping, and came back to
it when I woke up -- it was still running just fine, and there was only a
small slowdown on my PPro 200, which is about as much as Eternal or any big
wad like that gets on a 486. Previously, due to the Vissprites bug, Doom
would slow to a crawl when the number of things grew on MAP30 -- it would
stop drawing them after the limit was exceeded, but it was still slow. Now
it's not so slow.

Added -fastdemo switch to allow you to play back demos at the fastest speed
possible -- even faster than -timedemo. What this does is turn the clock
into a counter which increments as fast as Doom can read it. Crusher.lmp is
included as an example of what "-fastdemo" means -- it's a demo I recorded
on Doom 2 v1.9 which still stays in sync (unlike a lot of demos,
unfortunately). Run it under -fastdemo and see it play back as fast as your
computer can play it back.  Nothing is skipped (otherwise it would go out of
sync), except possibly the screen updates.

Added demo_compatibility global flag, to indicate whether or not strict
compatibility is required. If you want to know whether you should use
"demo_compatibility" or just "compatibility" when making a change, ask
me. <g> demo_compatibility is only turned on when both the compatibility
flag is set AND the user is playing back a demo -- just having compatibility
mode turned on does not necessarily enable demo_compatibilty, but
demo_compatibility implies regular compatibility. The idea is that you can
turn compatibility mode on or off with a single global flag, and then Doom
decides how strict to interpret it based on whether you are playing back a
demo or not. This is friendlier to the player than having to worry about two
compatibility flags or more than just two compatibility settings.

Looked into demo sync problems caused by my recent changes, and found that
it was the optimization of PointOnLineSide() and PointOnSide(), to use
floating- point arithmetic instead of fixed-point arithmetic, which caused
the most demo sync problems, so I've switched those optimizations on or off
with the demo compatibility switch, improving many demos' sync problems, but
not all of them.  I don't think we can expect all demos to work, but I still
like to use it as a goal to work towards with demo_compatibility. It's the
process of trying to reach demo sync, not the actual result of a demo that
works, that I'm trying to promote.

Included documentation on MUS files (MUS_FORM.DOC) for anyone interested in
doing the music. For those interested, I suggest you also look at the
allegro documentation, which has a section on its built-in midi player.

Sound effects have been fixed completely -- the minor problem still left
with the rockets was because a different SAMPLE must be used for each sound
or else Allegro kills all sounds of a particular SAMPLE when any one of them
is killed.  Now the sound effects are indistinguisable in quality from id's
Doom.

Lisa's problem (Doom seg faulting or other crash in her latest wad) is even
worse in DOSDoom 3 -- in DOSDoom 3, the rendering looks like it suffered a
"meltdown" and even the player's weapon does not display right. In this TNT
version of Doom, based on DOSDoom 2 but signficantly improved w.r.t. engine
limits and memory allocation, the crash occurs only when looking in a
certain direction in the wad. It is not, IMO, another engine limit, but a
bug in the current engine or on my changes to it. Engine limits are checked
for and are caught by Doom when RANGECHECK is defined.

01/01/98 -- killough

Note: the hi/low detail option, which was never fully implemented, has been
removed entirely by me -- there is no option anymore for low detail, and it
does not show up in the menu. This is better IMO than having a menu option
that doesn't do anything useful. The dead source code having to do with low
detail rendering has also been commented out.

Also, screenshots have been improved so that there is no longer a 100-file
limit (although the first 100 are still named DOOM00.pcx through DOOM99.pcx,
DOOM100.pcx and above are also allowed). Gamma correction is now saved as a
part of the screenshot, and no "screenshot" message appears. (Messages can
of course be turned off, but why turn off all messages just to turn off the
screenshot acknowledgement? It messes up further screenshots unless you wait
for it to go off, or you turn off all messages completely.)

Oh, and the "oof" sound which the player makes when trying to activate a 1s
linedef, now also works on 2s linedefs which block the player's movement.
I'm sorry if this hurts a secret (has anyone used this lack of player sounds
as a secret indicator?), but I think it's more consistent this way -- when
the player is blocked, if they try to activate it, they get the "oof" or
"noway" sound.

>This is what we have for engine goals to date. Comments and suggestions are
>welcome as always:
>
>TNT Engine goals
>-----------------
>
>Limits
>------
>
>+vp limit removal

Done -- Using chained hash table search instead of linear search on a static
array.

Array doubling was not used to solve visplane limits, but that's because
visplanes are essentially a caching problem, and caching is best done with
hash tables.

>+2S HOM removal

Done -- A array-doubling technique. I noticed another bug in the process --
bad pointer comparisions in a loop -- the old code was comparing a pointer
that was one element before the beginning of an array -- ANSI-C only
requires that a pointer pointing to one element after the END of the array,
need to be considered valid for comparison, and that comparing any other
pointer values outside of the array's bounds is undefined (except for
comparision of equality with NULL). End of computer language legaleze.

>+savegame limit removal (or at least doubling it for now)

Done -- the savegame buffer is resized automatically when it needs room for
more data. Needs to be fully tested though, on some large wads.

>-too many plats removal

Done -- the original structure was a fixed array of pointers, which was
searched by probing to find active plats.  Now active plats are dynamically
added to a linked list which can grow without limit. Revenge (the dead
falling player demo wad I made) was used to test it, setting off several
dozen plats simultaneously and watching them rise back in sequence in the
distance, like a rollercoaster ride.

>-animated linedef limit removal

Removed. The sidedefs are offset at rendering time using a global offset
counter which increases each gametic, instead of updating each sidedef
individually, and being limited to 20 animated walls.

>Bugs
>----
>
>-problems in DEFAULT.CHI/CFG (from the DOS port)

Will probably take a little work. Need to decide on a config file format
(ASCII? Scancodes?). I'd prefer compatible with existing format if possible,
but if necessary we can have our own format, in which case a migration
utility would be nice.

>-page fault on exit (from the DOS port)

Happens randomly for me now, although it's stablized now (no more loud
sound card noises or being left in graphics mode). Same with Venetian
blind crash -- it's intercepted and things are cleaned up before exiting.

>-fixing the inability to diagonally run (from the Linux port)
>
>+fixing IDCLEV to work (from the Linux port)
>
>-nomonsters bug fix
>
>-making illegal texture changes a nop rather than a crash
>
>-manual door triggers on 1-sided lines shouldn't cause problems.

Done. As part of this change, the "Ummp" sound is now heard whenever a
player tries to open a door on a 1s linedef, or whenver the player tries
to activate a 2s linedef which they are blocked by due to linedef flags
or sector heights (I always hated the inconsistent "umps" along walls,
depending on their structure!!!).

>-fixing the floor crusher problem (only kills minor monsters - can
> block player when it doesn't work)

The AV bug is another one to include in this category (again, we should
preserve current behavior with a switch since many wads use the AV bug
as an effect). I have not looked at the AV bug yet since other things
are higher priority.

>-trapping 0 tag trigger activation and noping them

I disagree with this change for compatibilty reasons.

[It's compatibility optioned in final release]

I know some wads where this is used intentionally, like a trap to turn out
all the lights in the level. The "no more plats" crash should no longer
occur, but that was a different problem altogether. As long as it does not
crash the game, I think tag 0 triggers should still work the same way.

>-savegame restoral fixes (failure to save original height of plats primarily)

Working on it. Need to integrate this with my "no more plats" fix, which may
or may not require slight changes to the active plats data structure.

>-correcting bullet/rocket/plasma absorption

Done. Problem was in an incomplete implementation of a "sky hack" which
prevents projectiles from exploding on sky walls (which would look as
ridiculous as the absorbtion). The implementation did not take the
projectile's z-coordinate into account fully, missing cases where there are
sky textures on ceilings, but they do not affect the collision, such as when
a lower is the blocker. Required trivial tests of z coordinates to be added
to the bullet and projectile cases.

Sky floors do not suck up fire the way sky ceilings do -- this is
potentially another thing to be fixed -- the whole thing with the walls
sucking up was due to the idea someone had that sky walls should not have
impact frames, because it would look strange to see a rocket explode in "mid
air" towards a sky. But the implementation was incomplete or just plain
wrong, not taking into account at what height the impact occurs and whether
sky exists at this height.

>-automatic hidden line setting to reduce spiderwebs in automap.
>
>-correct display of normal textures on 2-sided lines that now extend
> into the floor or ceiling

This is a special effect I think some people have used -- bleeding textures.
I started working on it but there were other things in my way. It's sorta
like Medusa -- messing with the 2s middle texture code, which is messy in
itself. <g>

[Released source doesn't have fix, for compatibility reasons, although
new 242 effect properly clips 2s linedefs which go across fake floors or
ceilings.]

>-tutti-frutti removal

Done. Problem was that the DrawColumn only tiled columns mod 128 -- if the
drawn column was higher than the texture, but less than 128, then it drew
whatever garbage was past the end of the texture's data (because it did not
wrap around until 128). New code allows arbitrary texture height info to be
passed to DrawColumn, and the code figures out whether to use a faster
algorithm similar to the old one, based on power-of-2 mods using ANDing, or
a more general algorithm which uses repeated subtraction but allows
arbitrary tiling on any height textures. Verified on some test wads --
textures tile correctly now regardless of height.

Might want to extend this item, to allow aribitrary-height textures.
[Already works!!! But column posts are still limited to height 254.]

>-remove Venetian blind crash

Done. Installed signal handlers and atexit handlers to catch abnormal exits
and execute cleanup code, such as restoring text screen, stopping sounds and
music, and reporting the signal if it was a segmentation violation or
illegal instruction, etc.

>-general stabilization
>
>User Interface
>--------------
>
>-default cmdline file extensions, always allow paths for file parameters

Done. Any extensions can be used and missing ones are supplied defaults.
You can use extensions and arbitrary paths for demos, and you don't need
to supply .wad extensions for -file parameters.

Also, the IWAD file determining game mode is intelligently searched for
now, in several search paths (Doom.EXE's directory, current directory,
$DOOMWADDIR directory, $HOME directory). So you can run DOOM.EXE from
anywhere now, and if an iwad file exists in the same dir as the .exe, it
is used; otherwise an iwad in the current directory is used; or one in the
$DOOMWADDIR location, etc. The precedences of each directory and each game
mode can be changed if we want.

>-allowing demos from any version wad to be loaded and run

Done. The version check is simply ignored now. Do we want a stronger test,
say one that prints a warning and waits for the user to press ENTER, if the
versions don't match?

>-extending MAPs allowed to Map00-Map99, and E0-9M0-9
>
>-permanent lights on full cheat

Done.

idbehold[lvri] are all infinite duration now. They stay that way until you
type the cheat again to toggle them off.

idbehold[as] also toggle properly now -- you can remove berserker strength,
and you can add it back, with full health, at any time. The computer map
can be taken away and added back too.

>-unattended demo completion (exit pressed) detection

Multilevel demos may pose a problem here. Do you want a report listing all
levels which were completed, like, say, a report of the level name followed
by the duration it ran, with one level per line in the order the levels were
played?

I propose a log file, either specified on the command-line (-logfile ?), a
default one that always gets appended to, or some combination thereof, with
a line printed for each level completed, perhaps also with the date and time
it occurred and the time elapsed in the level.

[Never got around to it in Phase I]

>-showing keyed door colors and possibly (with cheats) keys in automap

I don't care, since I don't use the automap, although you must remember that
yellow and red are already used for something, and this would be confusing
to those who already use the automap.

This argues for better customization options, such as more pull-down
menus. Right now the menu text bars are graphics in the wad, while it would
be nice if there was an automatic generator which could print arbitrary menu
text. Lots of things such as compatibility mode and automap colors would be
"user preferences" that I don't want to type on the command line (and I
don't think many people will want to).  More powerful menu and configuration
options is what this boils down to. [And they were implemented!!!]

>-allow use of caps lock as an assignable key for autorun.

We also need to fix Right CTRL for fire, and be sure to clean up the
keyboard state before exiting (perhaps by writing to the BIOS area),
so that keys stuck in CAPS until one or both shifts are pressed, won't
happen.

>-remove crash when menu is accessed and mouse speed is greater than 30.
>-possibly increase mouse speed maximum
>-have serarate horizontal and vertical mouse sensitivity settings.

Not a mouser so don't know or really care -- someone more appreciative
needs to do this.

>-3 digit frag counter.
>-frag counter for all players in the game.

Don't care about DM, so someone more appreciative should work on it.

>+doing all-at-once text display instead of char by char
>
>Optimization
>------------
>
>-initial performance optimization - the obvious stuff

Working on it -- fixed z_zone.c medusa-like slowdowns, among other things
(yes, a form of slowdown similar to Medusa in symptoms is apparently a
memory allocation problem). Tuned DrawColumn. Macroized and in some cases
hand-inlined small commonly used functions like FixedMul. Changed point /
line query functions to be macros which do intermediate floating-point
arithmetic instead of long complicated functions which must avoid fixed-
point overflow and still come up with the correct answer to where a
point is relative to a line -- only on some platforms would fixed point
arithmetic be preferable. I think we can assume a target machine of 486
or better, so using floating point operations for faster speed, is okay.

BTW, despite the "array doubling" coming up in our discussions before
the source was released, it has only been a good solution for around
half of the limit problems so far.

I've used these data structures/algorithms/optimizations so far:

1.  Array doubling (dynamic array that's realloced everytime it gets too small)
2.  Linear probing hash table with number of elements known a priori
3.  Chained hash table (array of pointers, each to a dynamic linked list)
4.  Remove the array and the requirement for it completely (wall scroll effect)
5.  Singly-linked list
6.  Doubly-linked list
7.  Inlining small functions by changing them into macros
8.  Replace fixed-point integer arithmetic with simpler FP arithmetic
9.  Loop invariant code motion (precompute constant expressions out of loops)
10. Replacing the selection sort of a linked list with the quicksort of a
    pointer indirection array, and removing the setup cost of the linked list
11. Giving hints to the compiler about common subexpressions, by putting them
    in separate local temp variables that are used often.
12. Limiting the scope of local variables to reduce aliasing and promote GRA
13. Cache frequent search keys with small numerical values in a lookup table
14. Runtime dynamic selection of division methods based on divisor
15. Hand-unroll loops and rearrange order of operations after unrolling

>Networking
>----------
>
>-IP networking and modem to current capabilites at least

I'll let Stan worry about this since I don't know diddly about networking
or its protocols, nor do I have the required test equipment.

>Sounds and Music
>----------------
>
>-improve sound quality as much as possible

Fixed. DOSDoom code was unnecessarily complicated and buggy.

>-bringing up music from .MUS lumps

Don't have the time right now, although I could do it later. If no-one else
wants to do it, I can, but it will take research into .MID and .MUS which
I'm not very familiar with. It seems like music would be as simple as sound
with allegro -- the biggest problem would be converting the .MUS into .MID,
which for backward compatibility would need to be done by Doom at
runtime. .MID lumps in the wad is another option, but it should not done
exlusively of .MUS.

>-check for stuck note problem - allow midi reset or force them
>
>Wad Structure
>-------------
>
>-rough specification of extended wad structure plan

We can discuss this, but I can't overemphasize the importance of backward
compatibility.

I've though about the idea of using a "higher-level specification" lump,
to tell more about the lower-level details of the rest of the lumps, sorta
like a configuration lump but it determines the language of the rest of the
wad.

>Limits
>------
>
>-pain elemental head spawn limit made variable or optional

Done, but qualified with a switch, since it breaks compatibility.

>-too many sprites in view limit

Done.

Main problem was sorting algorithm, which was O(n^2), and was unnecessarily
complicated -- it set up a linked list among the vissprites, which were,
ironically, first held in a static fixed-sized array, and then it used a
selection sort on the linked list, rotating items around a doubly-linked
list. All that was needed was to sort the original array in-place, but since
that would involve a lot of data movement because of large data items, a
separate array of pointers (a redirection list) was added by me to avoid too
much data movement, and it was sorted using qsort. A test with 500 monsters
showed no appreciable slowdown compared to an empty room, and all were
drawn. The new algorithm places no limits on the number of sprites in view,
and uses a fast sorting algorithm. After several hours of running MAP30 in
no-clipping god mode on a PPro 200, Doom still runs just fine even though
hundreds of dead monsters are there, and the player can still move around,
though a bit more slowly.

>Bugs
>----
>
>-medusa fix

Working on it, although right now the slowdown is negligible compared to
what it was in the original Doom. Making multi-patched columns work on 2s
middle textures may require significant work (or it may not -- more deep
study of the code is needed). [Problem was columns were not set up right.]

>User Interface
>--------------
>-in-game secrets/monsters progress indicators
>-heads-up health and ammo indicators
>-allowing combination of -loadgame and -record/-playdemo
>-allow reassignment of weapons keys
>-possibly have a separate "use" and respawn key.
>
>Sounds and Music
>----------------
>
>-replacing music with ambient sound or redbook audio as an option

Mod (soundtracker) music would be my first choice for background music,
since it can be included in the wad structure. There are already lots of MOD
players on the net, plus thousands of .MOD files. Briefly, .MOD files are
(usually 4-channel) music files which can use any arbitrary sound sample for
instruments. They tend to be much smaller than raw digital recordings, since
the samples only need to be stored once in the file. Since arbitrary sounds
are possible, lyrics are often used.

It should not be too hard to incorporate a .MOD player into Doom, given
Allergo's versatility, and I know of some good .MOD sounds that could be
used as background music for Doom.

>Wad Structure
>-------------
>
>-DEH lump for wad-specified engine feature/initialization control
>-wad lump to specify switches, animations, and skies
>
>#####################################################
>LATER (not to be done earlier than the second phase):
>#####################################################
>
>Limits
>------
>
>Bugs
>----
>
>User Interface
>--------------
>
>-game based menus (select skill by linedef e.g.)
>-console for game control
>-VCR style demos (very hard I think)

One thing I think we should use to prevent sync problems is to periodically,
or perhaps every so many tics, store the player's position in the lmp so
that even if the player "bumps his head" he will get "back on track". But
monsters' positions are important too for sync purposes, and it may be too
much to save all of them. [Too much work, it turns out]

>Optimization
>------------
>
>-full optimization

Working.

(BTW, don't call it "full" optimization. Just say "more" optimization.
I'm big with qualifiers. Usually many most sometimes maybe, but never
always fully forever.)

>Sounds and Music
>----------------
>
>Networking
>----------
>
>-peer-to-peer networking, joinable games

Stan-area.

>Wad Structure
>-------------
>
>-formal extended wad specification
>-utilities to work with new features and structures
>
>Engine Enhancement
>------------------
>
>-generalized scripting (including an event-based engine)

Very hard to do until current engine is modified to not use tic-based
events.

Current engine uses "thinkers", and goes though an entire list of them
during every frame. If a "thinker" does not have anything useful to do, it
simply decreases a counter or something like that and returns. No priority
queue or the like is used.

It's like a synchronous system as opposed to an asynchronous one. What I was
proposing was asynchronous -- an event could fire at any time and would be
handled when reached the top of the queue, unless it was cancelled earlier.

Doom's tick-based events are handled somewhat like polling-based IO, since
the tic counter itself is polled, even across networks, to keep the game in
sync with a clock. What I was proposing with event-driven simulation would
be more like using interrupts, and the synchronization would just be another
event -- it would wait until the next gametic occurs, and then the game
would move on to processing more events. The synchronization event would be
tied in with, or would be kept close to, the screen update, so that screen
updates occur at a regular rate.

>-extended resolution
>-sprite height
>-extended autoaiming

Easy to change the autoaiming behavior, but this should be qualified by a
compatibility switch.

>-look up/down, mlook
>-move up/down (jump, crouch, fly)

None of these should be the default, IMO.

>-gravity, friction, wind/current
>-BSP extensions - horizontal wall motion, rotation
>-sector based 3D
>-enhanced monster AI
>-inventory (view, get, drop, throw, give) and possibly "use X on Y"
>-more realistic definition of "wake up sound"

e.g. door openings, chainsaw idle, moving platforms, etc.

>-translucency
>
>#################################################################
>NEVER (Not forseen that we will do this til much later, if ever):
>#################################################################
>
>Engine Enhancement
>------------------
>-light sourcing
>-mirrors
>-3dfx/GL support

There will already be people doing this in other projects.

>-MMX support

MMX support, if you mean Pentium MMX, is too platform-specific IMO. Time is
better spent improving algorithms and doing optimizations which cut across
processor implementations.

I'm for 100% compatibility unless indicated otherwise in the wad, in an
environmental variable, or on the command-line. Visual or auditory defects
such as visplanes and other engine limits can be fixed without affecting
compatibility, but changing the behavior of the engine so that certain wads
don't work anymore, is unacceptable to me, even if a command-line flag like
-compat is used to turn it on.

I think Doom 1 testing needs to be emphasized. I'm a Doom 1'er, and use it
as often as Doom 2. Losing Doom 1 compatibility would be unacceptable to me.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[END of Log of changes to Boom Engine]

Lee Killough
killough@rsn.hp.com
http://classicgaming.com/doom/
http://www.trailerpark.com/tequila/killough/

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
# $Id: log_lee.txt,v 1.1.1.1 2000-07-29 13:20:39 fraggle Exp $
#
# $Log: log_lee.txt,v $
# Revision 1.1.1.1  2000-07-29 13:20:39  fraggle
# imported sources
#
# Revision 1.43  1998/06/03  20:23:20  killough
# fix v2.00 demos
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# Revision 1.42  1998/05/28  06:04:20  killough
# cleanup for public release, update
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# Revision 1.41  1998/05/26  10:51:54  killough
# Add address at top
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# Revision 1.40  1998/05/25  10:40:18  killough
# Fix wall scrolling bug
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# Revision 1.39  1998/05/16  09:17:24  killough
# Make loadgame checksum friendlier
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# Revision 1.38  1998/05/15  00:34:30  killough
# update
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# Revision 1.37  1998/05/13  22:58:37  killough
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# Revision 1.35  1998/05/11  00:40:39  killough
# update
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# Revision 1.34  1998/05/10  23:43:40  killough
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# Revision 1.33  1998/05/07  06:54:45  killough
# corrections
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# Revision 1.32  1998/05/07  01:09:59  killough
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# Revision 1.31  1998/05/07  01:09:01  killough
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# Revision 1.10  1998/04/01  16:07:23  killough
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# Revision 1.9  1998/03/31  16:13:26  killough
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# update
#
# Revision 1.2  1998/02/17  06:35:36  killough
# update
#
# Revision 1.1  1998/02/17  06:30:17  killough
# new name
#
# Revision 1.6  1998/02/11  13:58:59  killough
# update
#
# Revision 1.5  1998/02/09  03:24:19  killough
# update
#
# Revision 1.4  1998/02/02  13:17:26  killough
# update
#
# Revision 1.3  1998/01/26  19:30:03  phares
# First rev w/o ^Ms
#
# Revision 1.2  1998/01/26  05:46:44  killough
# update
#
#

